Winter storms can either trap you or spark a fire. For Landis Wine, it sparked a whole new chapter. Under the moniker Private Practice, this Richmond musician is stepping out on his own with a self-titled debut EP on Blank Verse Records. Forget the slick, over-produced radio bait. This is “Private Practice“, and it’s built on open-tuned guitars, gritty percussion, and enough late-night haze to fog up your windows.
If you know Wine’s past work with Richmond bands like White Laces and Opin, you know he usually thrives with a crew. But this time, the isolation of a brutal East Coast ice storm forced him to pick up an acoustic guitar with a fresh tuning and just let it rip. For the first time in over a decade, he wrote an entire batch of songs completely on his own. To capture that spark, he went back to his roots. We’re talking Southwest Virginia teenage vibes, a four-track recorder, and a stubborn refusal to sand down the rough edges.
Wine said it himself: this record is “a polite container for messy shapes.” That’s the exact energy coursing through these tracks. The EP drifts through a dreamy blend of indie rock and late-night pop, but it never tries to be perfect. It’s textured. It’s raw. He deliberately let the tracks get loose and ragged, rejecting the urge to polish them into oblivion. It feels awkward, exposed, and totally liberating.
He didn’t do it entirely alone, though. He brought in Kelsey Hulvey to just let out a full-blown scream on a track—which is about as rock and roll as it gets. Then he handed the whole thing over to Jeff Zeigler (who’s worked with The War on Drugs and Cloud Holdings) to master. Zeigler knows how to make a record sound massive without losing its DIY soul.
The EP clocks in at five tracks and just under twenty minutes. It kicks off with “Kords“, sets a moody tone with “Letter Interrupt“, and gets grimy with “Get Real Dumb“. Then you get the almost five-minute sprawl of “A Punch” before closing it out with “L.R.D.S.” It’s a short, sharp hit of pure, unfiltered instinct. Less than seven months from the first spark to the final master, it’s a testament to what happens when you just follow the idea instead of overthinking it.
This isn’t music for a stadium. This is music for a dimly lit room at 2 a.m. “Private Practice” is all about embracing the awkwardness, the ungainly moments, and the power of doing it yourself. If you want a record that sounds like a real human being pouring their guts out through an open-tuned guitar, grab this. It’s loose. It’s textured. And it absolutely rocks.