WHITNEY

---

When they show up for our shoot in Bushwick, Brooklyn, earlier this summer, the guys from Whitney—the Portland, Oregon-raised Julien Ehrlich and Chicago-born-and-bred Max Kakace —are just in from Albany, and their accommodation arrangements (or lack thereof) are emblematic of the carefree attitude they embody through their music. “We don’t know where we’re going to sleep tonight,” they relate, “but we have a lot of friends.”

The pair started writing together in the winter of 2014, after their previous project, the indie rock band Smith Westerns, dissolved. These days, they’re on the road constantly, having abandoned their apartment in Chicago to tour and promote their début album as Whitney, which was released in June. They have a free, take-it-as-it-comes attitude. And it shows—on their Instagram, where the whole band, performing members included, manages to get naked on more than semi-regular basis; in the way they casually, unabashedly party (“We drank like twenty-two beers before going on stage at Coachella,” says Kakacek with a sheepish grin. “It was boiling hot—I was watching Tame Impala, high on Adderall.”); and through their day-to-day, boyishly uninhibited interactions (the aforementioned nudity, the drinking, their teasing, etc.). These guys show up, drink a bit (or a lot), play a show, and sleep on the couch or the floor or wherever they end up when the night (or morning) comes to a close. They are disarmingly chill about the fact that the studio is sweltering and are game to stay a couple hours past the end of the agreed-upon shoot time, posing in heavy Fall looks with no complaints, their easygoing demeanor especially surprising given the fact that it is the day before their album, Light Upon the Lake, will be released on Secretly Canadian.

Ehrlich and Kakacek first met in 2011, when Ehrlich was playing drums for psychedelic pop outfit Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Kakacek was the guitarist in Smith Westerns. They were barely out of their teens, and if you hear them talk about those easy early days, you get the sense that maybe not that much has changed. “It was our first show as Unknown Mortal Orchestra and we were starting a month-long tour with his band,” recalls Ehrlich. “We met that night at a party and we didn’t even really meet or talk to each other at the show. We took their whole band to the Dandy Warhols’s studio space, called the Odditorium. It’s this big compound that’s really crazy looking—there’s like fur on the walls.” Soon after, Ehrlich left UMO to join Smith Westerns. “I’m going to say it was an age-difference thing,” explains Kakacek. “They were twelve years older than him or something.”

Not long after that, the guys moved in together to Kakacek’s (rather colorful) space in Chicago, where they established a laissez-faire tone. “Our door handle and door lock just kind of broke off—it was weird, because the downstairs doors didn’t really lock either,” recalls Ehrlich. “We had a large friend group and at any given time, one of our friends would barge through the door and be like, ‘What’s up?’ We just had an open-door policy, I guess, so that was the vibe.”

Today, almost two years later, they’re introducing the world to a different kind of sound. Whitney is an earnest, alt-country project, drawing influence from Marty Robbins, Neil Young, and Fleet Foxes. It’s woozy, of the summer, brassy, and pointedly vulnerable, which isn’t immediately obvious; it becomes apparent only once you move past the carefree strumming and take time with the lyrics. The band’s name comes from an idea of an imagined woman, or, alternatively, an imaginary third member of the band.

“It was all pretty much break-up stuff,” explains Ehrlich. They sing about not being able to sleep alone, realizing that moments that you held dear are maybe cheap in retrospect, and the long-coming death of a family member.

“The beginning was pretty organic and we were constantly surprising ourselves,” say Kakacek of the writing process.

“It’s not like we were not taking it seriously,” continues Ehrlich, “but it was just something with no stakes. It was like, ‘Oh, this is just super random,’ and the second song we did, we liked it a lot. After that, we were like, ‘Oh man, we could maybe make a whole record that we really love.’”

And love it they do.

“We give one hundred percent of ourselves to it, so there is no agenda,” says Ehrlich. They don’t ask “whether old fans are going to be down for this stuff. We didn’t really think that we had fans, so if people did like Smith Westerns a year ago and they like this now, then that’s a pleasant surprise.”

Regardless of how it’s received—and the reviews have been positive—the project is something special for the guys. “My dad taught me drums from when I was old enough to carry drumsticks, basically, since I was two,” muses Ehrlich. “I speak the language of drums pretty fluently and easily.”

Kakacek has been playing music—first piano, then guitar and banjo and violin—since “the third grade.”

They have a tour of North America and the United Kingdom planned for this fall, but on the eve of their record release, they can only focus one day ahead. “Tomorrow, our record comes out. It’s the best two weeks of our lives. That’s the most exciting thing we’ve done in the past two years of our lives,” grins Kakacek.

“Lots of happy text messages,” adds Ehrlich. “It’s a long time coming.”

Whitney performs October 11 at Bowery Ballroom, New York.