Interview With New York Rock Band of Music Teachers

F
or a music teacher, there are few things as rewarding as seeing a student master their instrument at a new level. “It’s one of the best feelings ever to watch someone improve,” says Micah Prussack. “I experience that, like, every day of my life,” adds her bandmate Nick Llobet. “It’s fucking great.”

Llobet, 36, and Prussack, 29, have both spent years working with students of “all ages, from seven to senior citizens,” at School of Rock programs and private lessons in New York. They’re also the core members of youbet, an indie-rock duo that’s been gaining a steady buzz. And right now, they’re sitting down at a diner in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, to talk about how they made a thrilling creative leap of their own.

The band’s new self-titled project, out May 1 on Hardly Art, is the first album that Llobet, a singer and guitarist, has written and recorded since enlisting Prussack as their bassist and “partner in crime,” and it shows. Teeming with hummable melodies and unusual hooks, from the grunge snarl of “Receive” to the lighter-than-air guitar-pop of “Worship,” youbet is the sound of two rock musicians who’ve found their wavelength.

Plenty of current and former students will be cheering them on this spring. Just ask Geese’s Dom DiGesu, who took lessons with Llobet for several years starting around age 11, right up through the time when he and his friends began what is now the biggest New York rock band in a generation. “Nick knew that I actually cared about music and I actually wanted to be there learning from him, so he treated me as a musician and friend instead of just another student,” DiGesu says in an email to Rolling Stone. “I look back on my lessons with Nick as the first time an adult took my playing seriously…. I’ll forever be grateful for Nick.”

Growing up in southern Florida, Llobet was 14 when their dad, a hard rock fan from Cuba, took them to see Metallica’s St. Anger tour in November 2004. “It was a life-changing moment for me,” Llobet says, sipping a decaf Americano. “I was completely obsessed with the idea of being a guitar player. It would eat at me all day long, all day long, all day long.”

They began practicing at a friend’s house whenever they got the chance. One day in ninth grade, when Llobet had a few Metallica songs down, the budding guitarist showed their dad what they could do. “I had a Micro Cube amp and my friend Derek’s guitar plugged in, and I played him the intro solo of ‘Sanitarium’ and the riff from ‘Seek & Destroy,’” Llobet recalls. “I’ll never forget: He picked up the phone, called my stepmom, and he’s like, ‘We gotta get Nick a guitar. Holy shit.’”

The Fender Stratocaster that Llobet plays today is the same one their father got them that same weekend at a nearby Sam Ash. “I haven’t put it down since that day, really,” they say, noting that they later stripped the paint off the guitar’s body and added pressed flowers to make the instrument their own. “It was like a magic carpet for me to access all my fantasies of what I could do musically.”

Llobet went on to spend a couple of semesters in Boston at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, rubbing shoulders with classmates like Adrianne Lenker and Nick Hakim, but never quite felt like they fit in there. They moved to New York in the fall of 2013, looking for a way into the dream they’d been holding close since that first Metallica show nine years earlier. “I was very shy, very overwhelmed by the stimuli of the city,” they say. “I hid in my room for three or four years, listening to music and learning songs. No one knew who I was, but I had this universe of passion inside me.”

Going out to see shows by indie bands like Girlpool and Frankie Cosmos unlocked something for them, and by their mid-twenties, they had found a home in the city’s queer music scene. “All of a sudden, the vision was clear,” they say. “It blew my mind wide open. It was like my whole world exploded. It was revolution in every sense — musically, politically, queer-wise.”

A chance encounter with Patti Smith at Penn Station around this time helped confirm that Llobet was on the right path. “When you have that fire inside you — something that you want to say, but no one will hear it — it’s like an extreme yearning,” Llobet says. “And when I saw Patti Smith, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, here’s my chance to see if it’s possible that this is real, that I’m feeling all this.” They chatted for a few minutes, with Smith offering some words of encouragement as they waited for their trains. “She saw this sad, insecure little person with a guitar, and she was very nurturing. Honestly, it was just what I needed at that time.”

Llobet played tons of DIY gigs with a rotating cast of friends over the years that followed, but no one completed youbet quite like Prussack, a New Jersey native and fellow rock lifer. “I started playing bass when I was 10 because my friends and I, in fifth grade, wanted to make a Green Day cover band,” she says. “We covered ‘Holiday,’ and that was it. None of those kids stuck with their instruments, but I really did.”

Prussack went to work at a law firm after college, then quit that job in 2021 to focus on teaching and playing music. “My parents told me, ‘Honey, this is a terrible idea,’” she says. “And I just said, ‘Well, if there’s ever a time in my life where I want to give it a shot, now is the time.’”

The two members of youbet hit it off the following year after crossing paths at a show by one of Prussack’s other bands. They found that as teachers, they had a common musical ethos — practice hard, keep getting better, never stop challenging yourself — and complementary personalities: Prussack’s organizational skills are a good match for Llobet’s restless creativity, and her gift for banter helps balance Llobet’s more introverted intensity. 

“I write a lot of songs, and I have a lot of visions,” Llobet says. “I need somebody that I can bounce things off of, somebody I can be funny with, somebody that I trust. I spent years and years and years looking for what we have.”

Both Llobet and Prussack can talk your ear off about non-standard chords and tunings, but for this album, they were more interested in using their highly developed instrumental techniques in service of something accessible and catchy. They recorded youbet over 10 days last year at their friend Katie Von Schleicher’s parents’ house in Maryland. (Von Schleicher, an excellent singer-songwriter in her own right, co-produced the sessions.) They spent that time pushing themselves to outdo everything either of them has done before, trying to hit that next level, just like they encourage their students to do.

“We’re perfectionists, in a way,” Llobet says. 

“But we don’t get caught up in making it perfect,” Prussack says. “We get caught up in the pursuit.”

“Every album is a chance to explore new things,” Llobet agrees. “[youbet] represents having not given up.”