It’s less than a week before their self-titled album comes out, and Nat and Alex Wolff are sitting on the curb in a parking lot. They’re in between rehearsals for their upcoming album release party, but instead of opting for a boring room inside the facility, they squint in the sun as a sign behind them reads “Dispatch vehicles only.”
“We thought this would be more interesting,” Nat tells Rolling Stone.
It’s this kind of off-the-cuff attitude that Nat and Alex brought to their eclectic self-titled album. Over nearly two years, the brothers wrote and recorded the project, marking their third LP as Nat and Alex Wolff. In that time, the duo kept a hectic schedule, touring as the opening act for close friend Billie Eilish, collaborating with the singer on a track, and juggling solo acting gigs. (Nat even sparked dating rumors with Eilish). Each milestone helped Nat and Alex tap into new creative ground as they learned to lean into their instincts.
“It feels like we’ve been working on it consistently for years at this point. We didn’t even consciously know why we were waiting, but I think it’s because we knew that we had more to give,” Alex, 28, says.
Nat, 31, agrees. “It definitely feels like it’s the most vulnerable we’ve ever been on an album,” he says.
Part of that vulnerability finds the former child stars unpacking their years on Nickelodeon‘s The Naked Brothers Band, the show and music project that brought the real-life brothers fame. “This album is reflecting a lot on how that time influenced who we became as adults,” says Nat. “It was super magical and amazing, but it was also a bit ruthless,” he says of the show, which ran from 2007 to 2009. “We’d go to school and then we’d walk out and there’d be a hundred people outside screaming. The dissonance between those two things was really strange,” he adds, admitting, “At that age, I didn’t really like being famous, but I loved making music and doing the show.”
Now, nearly 20 years after The Naked Brothers Band premiered, Nat and Alex are coming into their own as they take their life experiences and shape them into indie pop grooves and rock meditations. “I just feel more comfortable in my own skin so I know who I am when I’m interacting with the world,” Nat says. Here, Nat and Alex break down six tracks from their most honest album yet.
“The Back-Up Plan”
Alex: When I wrote that song, I felt like that was the beginning of being like, ‘Okay, we should get back in the studio and make an album with more of this… songs that were a little more raw, a little deeper, a little less worried about the presentation or how people would receive it. Nat and I had gone off in our acting careers to play different musical icons. I played Leonard Cohen and he played Scott Kannberg from Pavement. You can hear a lot of both in the music. I had always loved Leonard Cohen since I was younger, but I’d heard the album Songs of Love and Hate, and the song “Dress Rehearsal Rag.” I was like, “Whoa.” I didn’t know you were allowed to make music that sounded like that. It almost feels like it’s not allowed to be that raw.
“Soft Kissing Hour”
Nat: When we did the song with Billie, it was so homegrown. It was just the three of us in a room. We had one mic and I was holding it because we couldn’t reach it to the piano, where Alex was playing 20 feet away. It was Billie’s idea for her and I to sing in that section [at the end of the song]. She was like, “Oh, it’s a beautiful thing to do. We did it on ‘Wildflower.’” When we sent it to the mixer, he took out little bits of audio, like Billie’s dog snoring and we went, “Actually, can you put those back in?” Something about that was inspiring. I was like, “Oh, if you don’t have all the time in the world and all the equipment and you’re kind of running gun and feeling like it’s just play, there’s something magical that can come out of that.
It’s been really a magical experience playing that song all over the world, and having people in Brazil saying that they’re getting it tattooed on them.
“Horse”
Nat: The scariest one for me was “Horse,” which is a song that I wrote about an abusive, bad situation I had when I was a kid that led to me acting strangely in my adult relationships. “Why do certain things bring out a darker side of me that I don’t quite understand?” I was trying to capture that in the song. I remember my hands shaking when I played it on the piano for Alex. He was like, “That’s a good song. We should record that.”
“Midnight Song”
Alex: That’s my favorite song on the record. It was written on this really trashy guitar I had in New York with three strings. I love the structure of classic pop songs but I was like, “Well, what if I just tried to write a song with just three strings on it?” I did a little drum thing at my parents’ house on an iPhone voice memo, and it sounded so weird and cool. That song was hit at the perfect time in the recording process; it was before we’d gone into complete abstraction but after we’d gotten our sea legs of being in the studio and knowing what we generally wanted to do for the album.
Nat: We played it for my dad over Christmas. He’s okay now but he had to be in the hospital. We were playing him the album. We got to that song and he’s kind of quiet. Then goes, “Alex, you’re a weedhead, man. This is like acid.”
“Jack”
Alex: I love songs where the lyrics and the music are sort of at war with each other, like “Figure 8” by Elliot Smith. I love that idea of really bright music that is groovy and fun, but what you’re talking about is a little heavier. What I was going through with one of my good buddies was not super fun, but I wanted to do a song that felt really fun and crowd-pleasing, and had this jazzy sort of Seventies Steely Dan feel. The bridge is the fusion of the two, being funny and tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating, but also trying to say something that matters.
Nat: There is this thing that happens, especially in New York, where you’re made independent really early on as a kid and you have these formative experiences where everybody seems to be full of life and excitement. And then people start to grow up and change and suddenly they get weird or their politics get weird. You don’t see them for years.
Alex: They start wearing bandanas. There’s some traumatic things that can happen between friends.
Candy Speak
Nat: I started with a slightly more pretentious verse. And then I said to Alex, “I also have this thing that’s obviously too much.” It was the line “I asked if he stayed over when I left, you said he went home and you only gave him head, then I just saw red.” But he was like, “No, this is genius. That’s fire.” So we put it back in. But I got the lyric “forever for about a week” when I went to a Jackson Browne concert. When he was introducing a song, he said, “Yeah, I really loved her forever, but didn’t last very long, forever, but not that long” or something like that.
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