Cry Baby Debuts New Single “Hollister,” New Lead Singer and New Era
MOST PEOPLE WOULD REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME — they listened to a Cry Baby song. An instant hook that never misses with earworm melodies that bring the most nostalgic and exhilarating memories, Cry Baby is a quintessential band from the bustling New York indie scene.
And then it was announced that their beloved lead singer, Jamie Gray, was leaving the band.
After a brief period of regrouping and a beyond stellar addition of the new frontman, Alex Carlson, Cry Baby is doing the impossible. With a hard reset, the band uses these new changes to refine and find a sound that crystallizes all the most tender and precious moments.
“Hollister,” Cry Baby’s debut single for this newest era, is timeless in the most splendid sense. A melody and instrumentations that scream Y2K and the best summer of your life, all while carefully weaving the most refreshing sound of new indie with a perfect tempo and the right amount of reverb, “Hollister” is somehow only a prequel for what’s to come.
Around the release of the new single, Luna caught up with Cry Baby’s Alex Carlson (who chimed in mid-conversation straight from a doctor’s appointment), Joey Haines, and Carter Long on all the whirlwinds that came with changes, as well as the upcoming, yet-to-release new project.
LUNA: What is one song that you're currently obsessed with?
LONG: I'm obsessed with “Sunshine Baby” by The Japanese House at the moment. Fantastic song on their new record.
HAINES: I’m obsessed with the song “Rosary” by Push Ups. New York’s hottest — it’s really awesome.
LUNA: It is a very particular sound that's coming out of New York. You guys are one of the only full bands — there are a lot of duos and maybe trios, but there are very few bands in New York. Earlier this year, you had the opportunity to go off and do your own things. Why did you guys stay as a band?
HAINES: It’s a great question. I do think being a straight-up band — not just a solo artist with a backing band — right now is a little bit more rare. I think it's just because there's so many logistics [involved in] getting four or five people on the same page, doing something, committing to something that is really hard. We've kind of been through every single step of that. Starting in South Carolina, getting out to New York for all these years, the lineup changes … we always kept coming back to… “We do want to do this. We do believe in this. We do have fun doing this.”
And we think there's something special here, and we want to see it through. There has been a chance to stop every step of the way, but I think we always come back to “Now we know what that was like, we can do this,” and if there’s a way the world is going to allow us to do it, if we're going to find the right people to do this with, then we're going to keep trying at it, until we're basically forced to stop.
LONG: I think the question of why being a band… For one, there's just something about playing music with other people where you're more likely to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. We can actually play live and I think that adds so much more to an experience. We have stuff in tracks too … because we want to be able to get the full vibe of the record across. But I think it's also super great and it adds to the experience to have somebody on stage playing as many of those parts as possible — synth and guitar parts and all that — and doing all the vocal production that we would do on the record live. I think that adds a ton… I mean, I think being in a band is just cooler.
HAINES: When you're a solo artist, everything comes down on you. When you're a band, it's a team sport, you get to share.
LONG: And we get to do it all together. We get to go on the road together; there's a built-in community with a band that you don't have as a solo artist. [There’s less of having] to rely on you as [an] individual. I get to bring what I'm best at to the band, and I don't have to worry about the stuff that I'm not best at because Joey or Alex or somebody else is going to be better at those things. It really works out great, where all of our strengths are. It balances out really well—
LUNA: Oh my god, hello Alex! [Carlson joins the call]
CARLSON: Hi! I just left the doctor.
HAINES: What's the diagnosis? You're gonna live?
CARLSON: Well, we’ll table that.
LUNA: I was just talking about your sound. There's a very rhythmic and also melodic build to every single song that just feels like a theme song to something. And there's always something in the intro that just leads up to this big AH moment for most songs. Is that intentional? Does it just happen very naturally every time?
CARLSON: Yeah, Joey always wants to punch right in. He wants to hook it in right at the start. I was more of a slower song start guy and he's like, “We gotta get them going right at the start.” Isn't that kind of the thing for you?
HAINES: Yeah, I think so. There is maybe a philosophy behind it, but also it just kind of happens — I even clock it sometimes. I guess it just becomes a part of someone’s sound. When you’re starting something, it can be easy to not even realize that you almost have an inner formula or whatever’s guiding you.
On the new stuff, it has been cool to both play into that and then also try to mix it up and challenge that, so you're not just doing the same things again and again. But it is funny that everybody always has their [own] MO and it comes through. That's another thing of working with a band. It's nice because your personal MO and go-tos don't always make it through, and that's a good thing because it keeps it fresh.
LUNA: I feel like with every Cry Baby song, it fits so well, either as the top slot on a playlist or the ending track. It just has that quality to it, which is a very cool thing.
CARLSON: You heard it here first: Spotify! I was just saying to Joey, when we become the cover photo of All New Indie Pop, All New Indie Rock... [it would be like], this really speaks to that.
LUNA: I know you've been working on visuals with Gabe Drechsler for a second. Are visual elements important to Cry Baby? That's a rhetorical question. But when was that decided? How do you incorporate it into each era? Is there anything that is particular to this EP cycle?
CARLSON: We talked about the general vibe way early on. Honestly, you're right, it wasn't even really confirmed that I was going to be the singer or anything, but we started talking about the image, the look, and the vibe early on. We're trying to land somewhere in between the exclusivity that comes with a lot of the New York scene bands right now, and the accessibility [in which] Cry Baby was more on that end of the spectrum before. We work with another photographer as well, Steph Pan, who is a good compliment to Gabe.
HAINES: I mean, for bands, with social media, it all goes hand in hand. You can't have a song without some type of visuals — half of promoting music nowadays is the visual format on social media. So for us, we have always looked at it and described it as world building. You're basically on Instagram creating a world where people can go on and walk around like a gallery, and they can see everything and understand the music. They are the second part of the song. They help you to understand the context of it all. As soon as you see the video, you see the picture, you start building out the whole world of what the song is. I think bands like The 1975, beabadoobee, those are two huge artists right now, and I think they do a really good job of that. You understand the music more when you see it. We want to always have that being a constant so people can not just hear it and get it, but see into the whole world.
CARLSON: Also, the vibe of these songs, even between the two different photographers of this whole project… One of my friends said it the other day, she just texted me the word “ephemeral,” and this sort of nostalgic but fresh feeling. I liked that.
LUNA: I was reading the bio and a lot of it centered around nostalgia, but actually I think the sound is very different from Y2K, probably because of the production and how glittery and metallic it is, which is really cool and different from Y2K. So there's also that duality to the quality of the song as well. And I saw that the demo of "Hollister" was the first thing that was sent to Alex by the band.
LONG: Yeah, it was, like, 30 seconds long, maybe.
HAINES: I think I showed him that song when it was this little clip that had been around for months — even when Jamie was in the band that clip was around. I remember showing Carter and being like, “Some day, we got to do something with this.” I literally was watching this crazy bad one season show from 1999 that was a Dawson's Creek spin-off called The Young Americans, and it was fucking awesome.
The cast was crazy, but it literally got immediately canceled because it was trash (laughs). But it basically was an Abercrombie/Hollister ad but a TV show. It was so awesome. The vibe was so great. I just had an idea and this open tuning, and I recorded it really quick. I was just singing nonsense over it and it made me think of a boy band, but really it made me feel like those Abercrombie ads I would see growing up. It also felt like the beach. I played that for Carter, and then me and him started making silly videos of us playing it and singing to it because we thought it was really funny.
LONG: I don't remember exactly the context of whenever you showed it, but I remember I was in a very bad mood. I think it was really close to after we found out that Jamie wanted to leave the band, and then you showed it to me. I remember it just brought me joy. It just instantly took me to a very evocative place. I think you showed me that and maybe the old version of “Hollywood,” too. Both of those were just so exciting, so colorful to me, and had such a vibrancy that’s definitely nostalgic. It's not like it was nostalgic because it reminded me of music from that time necessarily — it reminded me of what it felt like to be young.
HAINES: Like playing touch football with my friends.
LUNA: Yeah, there's a kind of "forever" quality I got from it. It's less about forever, more timeless — it just feels frozen in time, like a very particular moment of pure joy.
CARLSON: It's right on the border of cheese. It’s just skating the line.
HAINES: Yeah, we're gonna have haters about it. But at the same time, it's fun. If you get that and enjoy the song, that means you're in touch with your inner whimsical child.
LONG: I mean, if you're talking about Y2K music and fashion, all of it, through [about] five years ago, people looked back on it and would basically just write it off as being cheesy. I feel like now a lot of people are realizing that a lot of that stuff was really cool, especially when I go back and listen to the music from that time. The melodies are just great. The pop hits of that era are written really well — you could play them on acoustic guitar and sing that melody and it's still absolutely beautiful because they're just really going for a vibe.
LUNA: Well, this is only the first single. Can each of you describe the song that excites you the most using color schemes?
CARLSON: I got one! Mine is probably “Pretend.” It's sort of like the lollipops that are white, powder blue, and pink. It's not Fourth of July, but it's summery. It's, again, sort of on the border of cheese.
HAINES: This is a cool time because we're going to release music basically right after we made it. We've never been able to do that. We're going with the seasons and we're going to be releasing a song every month for a little bit and through the fall. We're getting to actually, even sonically, walk it down the months — we're doing it with everyone, which is really cool. One of my favorites is this one called “One Thing.” It [feels like] getting into fall weather. And to me, I always see reddish orange with it, almost like the trains if you're in Manhattan. They’ve got these trains that have these orange and yellow seats, really old-school, and that color scheme is very fall. Whenever I listen to that song, it makes me think it feels like Manhattan, going on those trains, going out in the fall, and being out in nightlife and all the red twinkly lights.
LONG: For me, my two favorites are “The Show” and “Best Shot.” I think they have similar color palettes, even though they sound almost opposite. “The Show” is super heavy and “Best Shot” is almost a ballad, but they both have this very dark quality and moments of these certain sounds [that] come through that are almost neon. In “Best Shot,” these two vocals come in from the side in the chorus — they're panned hard left and right and hard-tuned singing the melody. Those just feel like a totally brightening up moment. And then on the second chorus, these harmonics on the guitar come in, and it's just this big, expansive, bright neon night scene. “The Show” has a very similar experience to me, even though it's much more rhythmic and heavy. There are certain elements that peak through that have this ephemeral quality where it brings some magic into the music.
LUNA: That's really exciting that you get to release it as the seasons go on and they're still fresh to you, because for bands that's just almost impossible.
HAINES: This is the perks of having no agent, no manager, no record label, no money — literally (laughs).
LUNA: Alex, why did you choose Cry Baby?
CARLSON: Well, I don’t know. I was playing a lot more music. I spent a little bit of time away from it. Joey popped into my head as somebody who I wanted to reach out to, and not long thereafter that post about them looking for a singer went up. I was like, “Man, I gotta go over there.” I had no idea how it was gonna go. I was hopeful, but that first time [I was] sitting down, it went so much better than I could have possibly hoped for. I think me and Joey were talking about stuff we were listening to, I wouldn't go so far, but I mean, not everybody's listening to him. And we were kind of doing the thing where we were like, “Okay, cool cool.” And then Joey's like, “Yeah, you want to, I don't know … hear some demos I got going on?” I remember he put on “Hollister” and I was sitting on his bed, and I was like, “Okay, this is uh... fucking awesome” (laughs). But I was trying to be a chill guy. I wasn’t being too cocky; I was withholding a little excitement, but honestly, from that first meeting it just felt like it was gonna be a thing. It was sort of like a first date that just goes way better than you could have expected, you're like, “Oh, I'm gonna marry this girl.”
LUNA: For Joey and Carter? How did you land with Alex as your lead singer?
LONG: It was really tough before Alex was in the picture. We were definitely flailing and didn't really know what we were going to do at all. We had a couple songs that Matt, our drummer, sings on. And there were just a lot of ideas going through our heads, but we just didn't know what we were going to do. I think I did not fully believe that we were going to be able to find someone that would really fit, and I was definitely a little helpless. I didn't know Alex at all. Joey and Alex knew each other a little before I'd ever met him. But whenever we first met, we worked on some stuff together and it was going really well.
At the end of the night we just talked for a long time, and I just saw how passionate Alex was about it and how much work he wanted to put in. That was truly a breath of fresh air. I could already see how committed he was to it and over just working on these songs together. We just worked so well together. We all complemented each other super well. But yeah, Alex fits unbelievably well. It was not a question once I saw that it works.
HAINES: There's always just a feeling once you start to work or collaborate with somebody … almost a type of language you all can speak together, but also a type of sickness, down to the very detail. We're always thinking, scheming, obsessing, being psychos (laughs). And I feel like Alex had that thing to him where he did not shy away from the work, he did not shy away from wanting to go through every single detail. He was super focused on every little part of it. That’s how we operate.
LUNA: Well, this is definitely a very exciting time. And I'm really excited to have the song out!
CARLSON: Thanks so much for your time. So awesome.
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