Nat And Alex Wolff's New Direction

Brothers Nat and Alex Wolff have been making music since they were kids. Alex, the younger of the two, earned his first writing credit at age 6, while Nat was penning forlorn songs and rearranging his preference Beatles tracks at 5 years old. Yet they've routinely been stronger with each other than apart, and their latest singles — "Cool Kids" and "Note" (out now) — are proof.


Though written separately, as they routinely do — Nat wrote "Cool Kids" if he was temporarily living in Los Angeles, and Alex penned "Note" right after a long night of tossing and turning through anxieties in his head — they weren't afraid to get a little bit experimental on the production side, bashing trash can lids and recording concealed messages on their keyboards. As a result, the two tracks fit correctly with each other in their own weird way. "Cool Kids" is the melancholic turn-up, while "Note" is the come down you play in your soft hours. "It was certainly more experimental than we've been before," Nat told MTV News of their creative process and newfound "fuck it, whichever attitude in the studio.


And this is just a taste of what's to come, as Nat and Alex have plans to release even more music this year. MTV News discussed to the duo about their new tracks, experimenting in the studio, and what (or rather, who) inspires them.


MTV News: Your last formal project with each other was the EP in 2016. Why did like right now feel like the correct time to release new music?


Nat Wolff: We've been working on music all through that time. We've been playing shows and Alex has done some music for his film that he made, and we've been doing different things. Yet the choice to come with each other as a musical group to do two new songs, that happened any time we began to go in a bit of a new direction. It was certainly more experimental than we've been before.


MTV News: Were you just sort of excited by the musical landscape? What inspired that change?


Alex Wolff: When you give yourself that quantity of time, it's about two years, I think that a bunch of albums come out from other people and we discovered a bunch of different people, and we were beginning to listen to a lot of different styles of music. I remember at the tail end of Public Places, our last thing, we were getting really into Frank Ocean's fashion of production and playing around with it. Tame Impala, also. So we began trying more experimental vocal sampling and laying our voices as instruments and cutting them up, as well as just listening to [Kendrick Lamar's] Damn and also a bunch of hip-hop albums.


So we took that time to go into these songs without our usual way of formulating music… We were bringing in crazy instruments, and sampling our vocals, and banging on stuff, and looping it backwards, and just like, fuck it, whichever, it all goes. We just got more ballsy. Hopefully, we'll get increasingly crazy up until we put out a terrible album, and then we'll begin to bring it back.


MTV News: Which song came first: "Cool Kids" or "Note"?


Alex: I'm not sure, yeah I'm attempting to think of the time…


Nat: We can just mention that they came on the exact same day because there's no way to prove that's not true. And that'd be kinda cool if we wrote them the exact same time in different places and then we showed them to each other. [Laughs]


Alex: It was around the same time, and we knew that we'd pair them with each other. That's one thing that we routinely subconsciously do is we'll pair up songs, like this vibe goes with this — the way you curate a playlist.


MTV News: What was the vibe you were going for with these two tracks then?


Alex: We like to mention that if a bunch of folks are hanging out in a room, let's mention like a melancholic party, they're dancing around listening to "Cool Kids." And then the party cools down, and there's like one or two people sitting there and "Note" comes on, and so they just cry as if they reminisce about the party.


Nat: They're nostalgic for the party that just happened.


MTV News: Nat, you wrote "Cool Kids" and Alex wrote "Note." How did you guys collaborate on these tracks?


Alex: "Note" just came out of me. I stayed up all night, wrote it on the piano. My girlfriend was in Germany working. I was paranoid, and I missed her. Know as soon as you stay up all night and also you just look terrible and also you feel terrible? I was in that state. Although the sun was also rising, so I kinda just began experimenting and writing a different kind of song. I think Nat was in a similar mindset while writing "Cool Kids." Then we got in the studio and just shattered whichever we would have done per year plus 1/2 ago, two years back, and tried something different for every musical instrument. We were pushing each others boundaries.


Nat: We have a crazy LCD Soundsystem drum beat in my verses to "Cool Kids." And that was order kind of the idea of the song, although somehow and then the song began not feeling like itself, so we took that out and it also opened us up to go in this fully other direction. That's the most exhilarating thing ever: throwing away what your idea is of the thing you're doing.


Alex: We just yelled into a keyboard, like an old Casio keyboard, for 45 minutes…


Nat: Alex has the head of a trash can, and he's smashing it against the wall towards the microphone. Occasionally the thought passed through our head like, "What the hell are we doing?"


MTV News: Let's talk about "Cool Kids." Nat, why are you so sad in L.A.?


Nat: That's what you got from it?


MTV News: One of the lyrics is "I wear a face that hurts a lot."


Nat: This song is about the distinction between the face that you wear as your persona then the person that you really keep concealed. That you push down, the shadow side.


MTV News: Like Carl Jung.


Nat: Yeah, exactly. I just remember seeing a drunk friend jump into a swimming pool with all their clothes on. And so they had their phone in their pocket. He woke up the next morning and was like, "What happened to my phone?" And we were like, "Your phone's gone man." That image got me to begin writing.


Alex: What's excellent about the two songs being paired with each other is "Cool Kids" is a lot of colors and impressions and images. That's what I love about it; everything is emotionally succinct even if some things are abstract and not 100 percent. "Note" is essentially exactly the opposite, where it's almost like a written down [inaudible 00:14:20] like long, like some days a long winded, although very stream of consciousness and inspired by Neil Young-style lyrics.


Nat: The headline is like, "Nat and Alex Wolff compare themselves to Carl Young, Neil Young, and the Beach Boys."


MTV News: I'll keep that in mind.


Nat: Also, I wrote the song any time we had been going through some big struggles as a family member, and I was stuck in L.A., While the rest of family member was in New York, and I was super bummed out. Honestly, I do feel like the song captures a feeling that I had of feeling really alienated and separated. I feel like "Note" has a bit of a melancholy, alienated feel too.


Alex: It was a lonely time.


Nat: Both songs were written at a time once our dad was really sick, and then he got better, plus it was a miracle. However at the time that he was sick, we were all sort of like split up. So I think you hear that in these songs.


MTV News: so you still write separately, right?


Nat: We routinely have. We've only written two or three songs with each other our whole life.


Alex: And they're terrible.


Nat: Honestly. They're terrible.


Alex: But "Note" also doesn't exist without Nat coming in and helping me get outdoor of it.


Nat: I can't really think of a song where one of us hasn't given a note to the other. You know what I mean? Every song has pieces of the other. In terms of production, we do everything 50-50. There really is nobody who I am on the same page with more than Alex. I read an interview with the Coen Brothers, where they were saying that the actors could go up to either of those and ask them a question, and they'd give the same answer. It honestly feels like one of us could go to the washroom, and the other could answer for the other.


Alex: And we fist fight in the washroom, and then we come back and everything's OK.


MTV News: Would you mention one is more detail-oriented than the other?


Nat: Alex.


Alex: Definitely. One might mention also detail oriented. One might mention this.


Nat: I would mention that. With "Cool Kids," I come and categorize kind of have a bulk of the idea, because it's my song, and it's a little all over the place, however Alex is really good at honing it. Then I would mention Alex did the bulk of "Note," and I'm good at sending it in different directions and loosening it up a little bit bit.


Alex: That's how we are socially too.


Cover artwork for Cool Kids + Note, painted by Brooke Adams


MTV News: What's the story in back of the single artwork? It's really striking.


Nat: It's a portrait of our grandma…


Alex: That our friend made, and it's cute. By Brooke Adams. She painted it, and we just thought it was a good representation of the melancholy...


Nat: We were recording those songs right whenever she passed away. Nevertheless it's also that she is a pretty person, and it's a cute picture. It's something we may agree on. Also, any time you're an actor you must take so several photos, and there's so several photos of you out there. So for our music it's nice to not have it be about us. Even our last album we covered our faces with weird lights and stuff. It's also meaningful to the family.


MTV News: It takes the focus off you.


Nat: And puts it on our grandma. Our grandma's like, "I don't want that focus."


Alex: "I don't like that music. Go back to the folk music."