Whitney on Living Together, Bad Reviews, and Getting in the Van Again

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OK, let's get into it: Chicago duo Whitney just released their fourth album Small Talk, and I was really impressed by how lush and full-bodied it sounded; to my ears, it takes their previously established sound across the first two records and pushes it into soft-rock territory in a luxuriously produced way, which is always a good thing. I hopped on a call with Max Kakacek and Julian Ehrlich as the summer was winding down to talk about the many twists and turns in their career thus far, as well as a host of other topics; I found our convo especially enlightening when considering the path the two have taken as buzz-band survivors in their previous band Smith Westerns, as well as how they weathered the aftermath of buzz that Whitney initially encountered. Check it out:

This record came about at a time in which you were preparing to not be roommates anymore. Then, you ended up still living together again. Unpack that for me a little bit.
Max: Yeah, at the end of summer 2023, I was seeing someone and considering a move out to L.A. Somewhat abruptly, it blew up. I hadn't made any legitimate plans, but I grew up in Chicago and lived here most of my life and was starting to spiritually disconnect with the city. As it goes with the end of relationships, you lose the person and the future you imagine. But I had to spend time reconnecting with the city, because emotionally I'd already started to exit. Around early 2024, I felt like I was home in my hometown again.

Julian: We were both in long-distance relationships. My ex-partner lived in Montreal, but we were also thinking about going to L.A. Everything was pretty up in the air. I'm not even from here originally, but I've been here for 13 years, so I didn't have much of a question, once that relationship ended, of what to do with my life. For Max, his relationship ending was more of a shock, so for me and the rest of the band, we were around to help him hold it together. We'd already started writing the record, but because of all of this we got to recommit to the album that we were making, instead of figuring out how to work long-distance.

You guys have obviously known each other for a long time now. How long have you lived together?
Max: A little over a decade. There was a period in which we both were living with our partners at the time, but we were on tour that entire year anyway.

Tell me about how your relationship with each other has evolved.
Max: The one constant in any place that we've lived is that what would be a Chicago dining room is our studio and workspace. We're always living in the studio a little bit. The way we moved around when we were younger was a lot messier—just raging around the studio and being 25-year-old guys in a band. We try to have more of a home and respect the space a little better.

In terms of songwriting, for this album both of us had a very similar experience with our breakups—which, looking back, were maybe not the healthiest relationships. Jules' might've been more tumultuous. But we were able to write from the same perspective, which is something that we've been lucky to do for the last 10 years. When we're writing, we get to bounce ideas off each other, as if we've lived the same life.

Julian: We've just seen each other through stuff—whether it's substance issues, breakups, or family deaths. When we were younger, we probably didn't know how to express the necessary emotions to make someone feel like they're supported. Our vocabulary and trained mannerisms around each other have changed, and that extends to everybody in the band. It's a very supportive nucleus for all of us. We've toured with a ton of bands who don't get to benefit from such long-standing relationships.

Max: Within our relationship and the band as a whole, everyone has the ability of some sense of forgiveness. There are disagreements at times, which is natural when it comes to working with people, especially in a creative space. Not everyone sees things the same way all the time. So we let ourselves have positive confrontations and then forgive each other pretty much the next day. It's about letting everyone be people most of the time.

Talk to me about self-producing this one.
Max: We've got to tip our hats to our bandmate, producer and engineer Ziyad Asrar. Him and I went to high school, he's been part of the band since day one, and there's a synergy between us. Julian and I get a little bit of demo-itis, in that what's created in the home studio feels really raw and fucked up, and we have an affinity for that. Ziyad is a perfectionist in some ways, where we're always butting heads over what should sound more or less fucked up. That balance helped a lot, because we were able to keep it together.

Julian: But it was also hard, particularly during the mixing process. It was the longest any of us have ever spent mixing a record, and particularly between Max and Ziyad, there was a lot of head-butting. But I do think that it was helpful for us to have someone like Ziyad. One day, we'll probably just fully give in and make a fucked-up lo-fi record. But these songs are like whatever a pop song is to the Whitney character that we built a long time ago, so I do think that they benefit from Ziad's approach to mixing, which is professional. He's always looking to make more of a hi-fi record. But I think the fighting was necessary, and where it landed was somewhere that truly feels tasteful and in its own space.

Max: Something that I really love about the way that he worked is that all the strings and horns were recorded in our dining room with one mic. He was able to bridge the gap where it didn't feel like it was recorded in our apartment. It feels studio-recorded. It's kind of a little secret of ours, that all of that stuff was done in the most...DIY is a complicated term, but we did it in the most simple way possible.

Let's talk more about how this record represents a progression in Whitney's sound, especially regarding the last record.
Julian: It was always going to be necessary for us to make a record like Spark, particularly because the second record was so difficult to make. There was a lot of pressure from the people we were working with at the time to just make Light Upon the Lake 2.0. That's a piece of advice I'd give to a younger artist right now: Specifically on your sophomore record, don't listen to people who want that out of you. It really sent us down a path of extremes.

Finishing Forever Turned Around was so hard. We really loved that record, but it was such a difficult album to make. It really brought a polar shift out of us—and, Spark, we're really proud of that record, and we love it, but we understand that, to listeners, it was probably somewhat puzzling and somewhat of a cliché for a band to dive headfirst into Technicolor whatever the fuck. Small Talk is a course-correcting, and landing back at a place where we feel comfortable to make exactly what we want to make. Leaving all the tools we'd gathered to make Whitney allowed us to come back and view them in a more fresh way.

I want to talk more about the notion of expectations. You guys are kind of interesting to me in that you've had to deal with the pressure of expectations in two separate buzzy bands now, at the time that there was this real palpable thing you could get from the music press and just a general word of mouth. It wasn't as fragmented as it is now. You guys experienced that twice, whereas a lot of people were trying to try to experience that once.
Max: With Smith Westerns, I was 19 when that started. By 21, when it was at its height, the people we were surrounded with ended up being very unhealthy for us in many ways. That band ended for multiple reasons, and Me, Cullen, and Cameron all text a couple times a year and try to stay in touch, but for a while we took some big space from each other. That quick success was really negative on all of us.

I took a break from making music, and when Whitney started up and started getting the same [attention], I felt excitement to be able to keep on doing it—like I'd been given this second chance after the first one blew up in my face. I was somewhat of a terror on my own in Smith Westerns, so it felt good to be given a second opportunity to reset things. But with the pressure going into the second record, I had this idea of, "Yeah, I've done this before. I know what it feels to have the pressure of a sophomore post-buzzy release." It was as hard to make the sophomore record as it was making Soft Will with Smith Westerns. Some part of my brain, it's really hard to shut out the noise.

To be completely candid, with Spark, we went through what a lot of bands fear as the worst-case scenario, which is tough critical reception. People didn't connect with it the way we thought they would, and we had to question some of the decisions we made while making the record. After that, it felt the most freeing to make the next record, because whatever you're scared of coming to light—having to live through it—gives you a lot more freedom in your decisions afterwards. With the buzz, when you're in there, the pressure is getting to live through something not working out, and that changed a lot of things for me.

Julian: I do remember, when we started Whitney, being like, "Oh my God, we're gonna like do this so much differently. We're gonna treat each other with respect and make sure that the foundation of this band is built on friendship." But you reach a point where the music industry is still way bigger than you, and there's so little that you can actually change about the systems and channels that your band is pumped through. I do think we built the band on such a strong and stable foundation, which is why we made another record after Spark. A band like Smith Westerns simply would not have made it through that.

I'm always curious to hear from Chicago natives what they think makes the city so creatively fertile. A lot of good music has come from the city over the years!
Julian: We used to answer this question by just talking shit on LA and New York.

Very fair. If you want to do it again, there's no shortage of things to say.
Julian: But, for real, there isn't really a ladder to climb here. People are real. It's a city that has harsher seasons than even New York does. You have to work to even exist as a functional human, at times. There's more humility involved and a tighter knit community. Everyone basically lives in the same four neighborhoods, so you're just seeing everybody around—but, that's similar to New York and L.A., too.

Max: There's also a very specific conversation between genres here. The word "musician" in Chicago is with a capital M. If you play music and try to like make that work for a living, you gain a certain respect from it. People collaborate between genres more here in a very easy way, and you find these weird bars and places to have conversations. It feels like the city is trying to prop itself up as a whole sometimes. and we have to fight for ourselves.

I don't want to get too far into the end of Pitchfork Fest or anything, but growing up I do feel like the 1 to 3 p.m. local slot gave validation to what I was doing. When I first got that slot, it felt like, "Wow, I can make an entrance into this industry in a way that I never imagined when I was younger." It was important to a lot of younger bands here. A big part of the reason why the festival leaving Chicago bummed me out is because we need to find a new way for younger bands to have this platform that's a little more legitimate and kickstarts inspiration.

Let's talk about the financial viability of being musicians at this point.
Max: We toured the whole summer in a van, and we're starting to plan Europe. The reality is tough.

Julian: Pre-pandemic, we were comfortably touring in a bus. Post-pandemic, it makes sense for us to book smaller shows instead of taking big-ass swings on large venues and taking guarantees that we feel unsure about. We're in this weird middle ground. Pre-pandemic, we built out our crew a little bit more, and now we simply can't afford some of the quote-unquote luxuries that we had pre-pandemic. Don't get me wrong, we're a lucky band. We consider ourselves quite lucky, and we know a lot of our peers and friends struggle with this in a more extreme way at times. But there's a lot of logistical issues to sift through.

Max: I just turned 35 two days ago, which is wild. Julian just got married. When we were making the most money on the road is when our responsibilities at home were pretty much nothing. Now, people are starting families and stuff, so it's a different conversation if they're able to maintain that with just music.

What would you guys tell a younger band right now that's starting out? Julian: We used to buy cots, find the biggest room in a friend's house, fill it with cots and sleep in it.

Max: That's the thing—even though Whitney was never as punk as Smith Westerns, we cut our teeth on what punk touring was like. Live in the van, have cots and sleeping bags, and find somewhere to sleep. Commit to doing that until you can afford a hotel for the band. It's almost archaic to just tour forever, but that's kind of how we got to where we are, and we love it. But I don't know if that's really viable today. We have trouble enough doing it ourselves.