Q&A: Ctrl + Alt + Cafuné: Decoding ‘Bite Reality’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY JOY VILLANUEVA ☆
Photo by Akram Shah
WHEN SEDONA SCHAT AND NOAH YOO FIRST MET IN COLLEGE — they couldn’t have predicted the cultural footprint they’d leave as Cafuné. Known for their 3X Platinum hit “Tek It,” which has surpassed a billion streams, the duo has made a name for themselves with their sweet, infectious indie-pop sound.
Now, with their new album Bite Reality, Cafuné is moving toward a more concentrated sound that still nods to the bedroom-pop roots fans fell in love with. The record dives into the complexities of the internet and modern relationships, merging weighty themes with the signature warmth that has defined their music.
As they prepare to hit the road on their Alive Online Tour across North America, Cafuné proves that while the world around us might be chaotic, their music continues to be a safe haven for all.
Read below for Luna’s conversation with Cafuné on Bite Reality, the creative process behind it, and life navigating music in the digital age.
Photo by Akram Shah
LUNA: Congratulations on the record! How are you feeling—excited, nervous about it coming out?
YOO: I think we’re feeling good. It’s been a minute since we put out a full-length album, and if I’m being honest, I had a moment today. We went to the beach and ran around, which was crazy, but afterward I realized it comes out next week.
SCHAT: Eight days, baby!
YOO: Eight days! I really thought we had more time. But yeah, I think we feel pretty good about it.
SCHAT: From the first single dropping to now, it’s been a lot of “Okay, gotta make sure we post every day,” while trying to promote this. I do feel like once the whole album is out, it will be more gratifying because people will actually get to experience the full piece of art. I’m super excited for people to hear it, especially since a lot of my favorite songs on the album weren’t singles. I love the singles, but I’m really excited for people to hear the rest.
LUNA: What are your favorites off of Bite Reality? I think mine is definitely “e-Asphyxiation”!
SCHAT: Yeah! We had a lot of fun writing that song—it’s one of my favorite songwriting memories. While we were writing it, we made some kind of joke about e-asphyxiation, and I was like, “Can we do that? Can we use that?” It’s just a fun song. Weirdly, it makes me think of Simple Plan for some reason. I don’t know why.
YOO: We’re pretty goofy as people, but whenever we try to be goofy while writing music, it’s really hard. We both get caught up wanting it to be meaningful or emotionally effective, and all these thoughts enter our brains. With that song, we were looking for a rhyme, and Sedona said, “Asphyxiation… that’s kind of…” And I said, “What if it was e-asphyxiation?” She paused, turned to me, and was like, “Like email? Like e-waste? Is that stupid?” And I said, “No, we should do that.”
LUNA: That song also introduced this dystopian, cyberpunk world. Did you have a visual or narrative universe in mind while crafting the album’s story?
SCHAT: Definitely. As we were finalizing the tracklist, there were some pretty distinct things I visualized. One had a dystopian cyberpunk vibe, and the other side was much more romantic, dreamy, and naturalistic. We just shot a second music video this past month that hopefully gives that other world a little place to live. I feel like “e-Asphyxiation” and “Temporary Lover” evoke the more dystopian imagery the most—they’re kind of the primary visual thrust of the album.
YOO: The cover art was always meant to be the main visual tied to the album—more than a music video or anything else, a really evocative image. The camera work came from a CD I found on the street after a storm. It was all messed up and degraded, with this iridescence happening. We used that image as a placeholder between ourselves, thinking, “This is cool. I want our artwork to have this vibe.” Over time, we got attached to it and wanted it to feel like an unearthed artifact. I think people often feel doomy, especially now, but one thing that grounds me is remembering that people have always felt doomy. There’s always a history of artists continuing to make records, write songs, and create art—even when the world seems like it’s falling apart a little.
LUNA: I think everyone can kind of feel that heaviness and doom, especially with everything happening in the new world of AI and technological advances. This record also directly engages with that sort of technology, but also personal identity; we can see what your relationship with the internet is like these days through “e-Asphyxiation.” Do you think that sort of connection inspires more creativity or actually more of an existential dread?
SCHAT: Definitely the second one. I think one thing about this idea of unnatural artifacts—what happens when they decay or fall apart—is that you can find inspiration in modern technological circumstances. Even though many aspects can be soul-crushing, there are still interesting things you can discover within that. I think we’ll continue to see, in the coming decades, what humanity and art look like, represented through artificial things, including AI. If that makes sense.
YOO: I’ll take the other side. I’m inspired by how people are adapting. For a long time, when we were in our 20s, social media wasn’t new, but it was quickly understood that to get ahead in your career or build your business, you basically had to have a double presence online. I find it heartening that younger people—who don’t remember life before smartphones or posting and have been online since they were kids—are realizing it’s ultimately empty. The internet has made life more convenient, but it hasn’t solved the actual problems that plague us as people. That said, there’s still a lot that’s inspirational, because the internet is just people… until it’s not.
LUNA: So you two first met in college, and from the start Cafuné has always thrived on contrast. How did your relationship early on influence that chemistry, and how does that creative push-and-pull still play out today
SCHAT: The nexus of the band is that Noah and I are very different and approach art from different places. When we were younger, we defined it in a much simpler way, like when we were in college.
YOO: Yeah, in college we used to frame it as a dichotomy—she does this, I do that, and together it’s something different. Over time, our tastes have influenced each other and we’ve grown, but Sedona’s right: the friction between us often produces the best stuff.
SCHAT: I used to tell people, “Thank God for Noah,” because he helps me finish things. He offers structure when I’m kind of in the clouds. The flip side is that I encourage him to be open to ideas that might not always make sense or follow the usual rules of songwriting or production. When you’re just two people, you’re forced to negotiate and compromise, which isn’t always the case in something like a four-person band. It’s always been a negotiation between the two of us.
Photo by Akram Shah
LUNA: I have to do this, it unfortunately is an obligation—I have to talk about “Tek It.”
SCHAT: Haha, that’s really sweet of you to intro!
LUNA: That song became a massive viral moment that introduced your music to millions of people. Looking back now, how do you feel that moment shaped your career, and do you feel like it set any expectations you’ve had to break away from?
YOO: It was really cool as an experience because every artist wants their work to find its way into people’s hearts, for people to make memories with it and take it in. What happened with “Tek It” is completely unreplicable—it happened at a very specific moment in time. The world and the music industry have changed so much in the past couple of years. For us, it was a relief because we really liked that song and had faith in it. When it initially came and went, we thought, “Okay, that’s a shame, but we can keep going.” To see it get a second wind two years later was really gratifying. We’ve never written anything with the goal of it going viral because that’s uncontrollable. It’s a fool’s errand.
SCHAT: We would have gone insane if we felt like we had to replicate it. People are always like, “Make more music like ‘Tek It.’” But we both hold the perspective that art isn’t about repeating what you’ve done. And as Noah said, no matter what, you don’t get to decide what the internet chooses, and dedicating energy to chasing that isn’t a good way to make art. It was a period of growth—going through that, adjusting to the intensity and pressure—but we knew we just had to keep doing what we do. People can take it or leave it, but either way, we’re very lucky to have a song that really connected with people.
LUNA: How did you come up with the name Bite Reality?
SCHAT: We were talking about reality bites and throwing around a bunch of ideas, but some felt a little too on the nose. We wanted something with a sense of humor, a tongue-in-cheek quality, and also a confrontational attitude. When we settled on the title, it felt like a direct action while also giving off a bratty vibe.
YOO: If I had to nutshell it, our goal with Bite Reality is to say: whatever situation you’re in, you need to grapple with it and face the realities of your life. It doesn’t matter whose fault anything is or why things are the way they are—you need to confront it instead of running away. In that sense, it’s also a response to our first album title, which was about almost wanting to throw everything out and escape. On this record, some lyrics explore wanting to run away or hide, but it’s obvious that doing that accomplishes nothing for yourself or anyone else. Some songs are written from a place of wanting something you know isn’t necessarily good for you, and that tension is part of what we wanted to convey.
LUNA: This album feels like such a distinct move for Cafuné. What felt different about writing and recording this album compared to your previous work?
SCHAT: We were able to take basically all of 2024 to write a bunch of songs. At the beginning of this year, we also had the resources to record in a studio, so there’s a literal sonic level that feels a bit more “real.”
YOO: I’d also say this is the first time we had the chance to write so much and then curate a tracklist from the 30–40 songs we wrote over the year. It’s also the first time we had the same drummer across all the songs—our boy Connor Parks, who played on the album and tours with us. Drums have always been really important, and having a dear friend we’ve been playing with over the last few years helped us hone the band’s sound, both on record and live. This is also our first record after gaining touring experience, so we really wanted to bring the band we became on the road into the studio and make a record with that energy in mind.
LUNA: You’ve both been so hands-on in production and songwriting. Was there a moment during Bite Reality where you surprised yourselves, like, “Oh, we’ve never gone here before?”
YOO: There’s a song called “Stupid Justice” on this album that’s one of the more “turn your brain off, turn the amps up” songs we’ve ever written. That one came from thinking about what would be fun to play live, and what kind of experience we wanted to create for listeners. A lot of the time, when we write something, the first question is: is this kind of silly? Is it too simple? Those are the moments that end up being exciting.
For example, Sedona sent me the demo for “Tek It” and asked if I thought it was dumb. Doubting it like that—that’s where the fun starts. You ask yourself, “Is it too easy, or is it something weird?” That’s exactly what happened with “Stupid Justice.”
SCHAT: With “Stupid Justice,” the demo was very short. At first, I thought we needed another verse or section, but over time we realized it didn’t need to be more complicated. We just let it be. It’s a knuckle-dragging, fun song, and it’s not ultimately about clever songwriting. For songs like “e-Asphyxiation,” we focus more on structure and cleverness, but with this one, we let it exist as it was.
YOO: It was exciting because the stakes felt lower, which allowed us to be freer with the sound and what we were doing.
LUNA: You’ve described “Attack + Release” as “a crisis of faith.” Was there a specific experience, personal or societal, that triggered that reflection?
YOO: That’s one of the songs on the album that I wrote on my own. I believe I wrote it after we had a conversation about hopelessness, or feeling uneasy about your place in the band—or your place in life in general. It was meant to be a meditation on that feeling: losing confidence, losing faith in your life’s ability to be what you want it to be. I think everyone experiences that at some point, whether it’s losing faith in a relationship, in yourself, or in your life’s trajectory. What we often need is a reminder that you have to believe in order for anything to happen—it’s circular.
SCHAT: When Noah gave me the song and I really listened to it, I was amazed by how he describes its origins. The line I connected with most was, “Cosmic patterns leave you spiraling.” What’s so amazing about this song is that it’s about a very personal crisis, but what makes it so affecting and beautiful is that zoomed-out perspective. It grounds you—at least for me—by reminding you of your size in relation to the universe. That perspective can relieve pressure and help you work through a crisis of faith. Noah’s essentially saying, “I’m just a part of this huge thing.”
YOO: It also highlights the importance of other people, because they can remind you what truly matters.
Photo by Akram Shah
LUNA: This album feels super cohesive, like it proves again that you two are really locked in with each other creatively. How have you been able to stay close and maintain that connection as collaborators and friends while navigating everything that comes with being in a band?
YOO: I really appreciate you asking that question, Joy. In the last couple of years, we started seeing a band coach for the first time.
LUNA: I had no idea those were a thing.
YOO: He’s kind of a life coach type. He’s also in a band and was a lead singer, so he really understands our dynamic. Having a bandmate who’s also your best friend, business partner, and family—that’s a very complicated situation. Over time, we’ve realized that in order to be good to ourselves and to each other, we need to care less about what the other person thinks. It’s more important to respect someone’s feelings while also allowing them space and the dignity to process things at their own pace.
We also started running together this summer, in order to have a place that’s always positive.
SCHAT: A third space!
YOO: Exactly. Hanging out as friends is always fine, work is almost always fine, but sometimes it’s not. Running became a space that’s always great.
LUNA: With Bite Reality confronting so many heavy truths, especially with how media-driven our society is today, what do you hope listeners take away after sitting with this album?
SCHAT: A number of the songs that aren’t explicitly about dystopian, political, or technological circumstances are very much about confronting the reality of a relationship—familial, platonic, or romantic. I hope people listening can take away that whatever they’re going through with someone, it’s worth working through the hard stuff. True growth and healing come from getting into really difficult moments. When we wrote Running, it involved talking about depression and wanting to shut everything out. I hope that anyone hearing these vulnerable, heavy, or sad moments can find a space to process some of those challenging feelings.
YOO: I hope it encourages younger listeners, specifically, to talk to people more, open themselves up to the world, and engage with those around them. Even small actions can have an impact. We’ve really come up against the passivity of the moment—people thinking, “This isn’t for me” or “This life doesn’t make sense for me.” I hope listeners get the sense that whatever they’re yearning for, they can go out and find it.
SCHAT: You exist. You matter in the world. Even if you feel small, the things you do with the people in your life and the community around you still matter.
LUNA: Is there anything else you’d like to share with Luna?
SCHAT: We’re going on tour! Live music matters. Playing real instruments matters. Making music in a room and experiencing it together has real value.
YOO: Music is social, period. For a long time, we were basically a laptop band—a bedroom-pop project, just the two of us holed up, writing songs and sending them back and forth. It was pretty solitary. Collaborating with more people has really strengthened the experience and reminded us that music is special because it can be shared and enjoyed together.
