Q&A: Rebounder is Ready for its Downtown Moment
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY NEO VASQUEZ ☆
PHOTO CREDIT: MARCUS MADDOX
AFTER YEARS OF OPENING SETS AND EPS THAT HINTED AT SOMETHING BIGGER REBOUNDER IS FINALLY STEPPING INTO ITS OWN SPOTLIGHT—Brothers Dylan and Noah Chenfeld are gearing up for their long-awaited debut album with “Downtown People,” a new single that captures the restless, ever-shifting pulse of the city they’ve called home their whole lives.
Dylan and Noah grew up together on the Upper West Side before eventually landing in Brooklyn, and New York has been a constant presence in Rebounder's music since their early EPs: Subway Songs and Summer Songs. Though the brothers are quick to point out the city isn't their only reference point; touring behind acts like Phoenix, MUNA, Cults and The Neighbourhood has shaped their sound just as much. Now, “Downtown People” arrives as the vibrant title track and lead single from their long-awaited debut album, out November 6 via Nettwerk.
The song, and its Grant Jorissen-directed music video, catch the brothers midscene: watching as people pass through midtown. It’s a song with real affection underneath the observation and it sets the stage for an album the Chenfelds spent over a year finishing, one they describe as a surprising, wandering, but throughlined record built almost entirely between the two of them.
Luna caught up with Dylan and Noah to talk about Knicks watch parties, building a studio out of bedrooms and kitchens and what it means to still call New York a defining influence on everything they make.
PHOTO CREDIT: MARCUS MADDOX
LUNA: I’d love to hear how you guys are feeling now that “Downtown People,” the single, is out and the album’s on the way. What is that feeling like?
DYLAN: Feels great. We're really, really excited. I think the record’s a lot of fun, and I just can’t wait to have it out so more people can hear it and we can start playing it. In general, it’s an exciting time.
LUNA: I read that you spent about a year working on this album. What made you decide this was the right moment to release it?
DYLAN: I think we just thought these songs were the ones that would stand the test of time. We made so many songs for so long, and we were just like, these are the ones we love—now let’s do it. It wasn’t about, “As long as we put out some stuff in August and November, we’ll be good to go.” It’s more just, “This is the stuff we’re really excited about. All right, now it’s done. We can do it.”
LUNA: I was watching the music video, and it felt like you guys were really in it—you were right by Penn Station. What was the process of working on that, and what was your involvement?
NOAH: Dylan had a great idea for that video. It was during the NBA Finals—take it away, Dylan.
DYLAN: We’re big fans of the Knicks, everyone’s new favorite band, and it felt like we were going to all the watch parties at our friends’ bars. We wanted to go watch one uptown before we knew that was going to end soon. So we went up there for a watch party, and figured—well, we know we’re bringing our friend Grant to shoot the video, so we’ll wear matching outfits so it’s clear we’re doing a thing, sing the song a few times, and then we can just be uptown watching the game. That’s what we did. It worked out.
NOAH: I just realized something really ironic—the song is called “Downtown People,” but that video captures us in Midtown, which is a very rare occurrence for us.
DYLAN: It’s true. We wanted to capture the energy of the Knicks run, and we also wanted to watch a game at the Garden, whereas every other game we’d watched at bars downtown. It felt like our excuse to finally go above 14th Street. “We’re really gonna do it this time, guys.” And we did.
LUNA: Your whole process seems very go-with-the-flow. Do you think that relates to how you approach the songs themselves?
DYLAN: We work super hard on the songs, but we don’t force it. The songs we write are the stuff we want to hear, and we stop when we like them—when we think we have something really good. So we try to keep it somewhat natural.
NOAH: With us switching off on vocals and writing together, I think on this record particularly, things go in different directions in a way that’s exciting. I think the record has a throughline, but there are also a lot of surprises.
LUNA: Is “Downtown People” about a specific crowd you’ve run into, or more things you’ve noticed changing over the years?
DYLAN: I think that song is less about things changing, or gentrification, or anything like that. It’s more about—you go to Fanelli’s too late at night, and they say, “We can’t sit you outside, we’re done seating outdoor tables.” They clearly make some value judgment about your level of charm or fame in regards to how you get a reservation. We said, well, let’s make that the lead single of our record. It’s about the people you meet when you go out, and the characters they play. There’s no hate in it—it’s a song of love, honestly. It’s very in support of pretty girls who get seated at restaurants faster than we do.
NOAH: I think Dylan’s lyrical perspective has always done a good job of being simultaneously inside the thing and outside the thing, slipping into both points of view pretty seamlessly. “Downtown People” is another example of that.
LUNA: How do you think the city affects the rest of the songs on the album? Is this a very New York-specific record?
NOAH: New York will always have a huge influence on our writing. Growing up in the city, it just influences everything. There are a few songs on this record that are specifically New York love letters, like “Wild Side Land.” But I wouldn’t say we’re super conscious of trying to live up to any New York archetype—we have a lot of influences that go beyond New York too. But New York is forever our main influence.
PHOTO CREDIT: LAUREN DAVIS
LUNA: “Downtown People” is the title track. How do you think it sets up the rest of the album?
DYLAN: It’s hard to sum up an album in one song. Even though most of the record is just the two of us playing a lot of instruments and going back and forth on vocals and production—that’s like ninety percent of it. There’s still a lot of songs, and it covers a lot of ground. It’s not like the entire record is mid-tempo disco songs that sound like the Rolling Stones doing disco—that’s not what the whole album is. But it feels like a fun nighttime record to dance to, hopefully. That was the goal. It was actually the last song we finished for the record, even though it doesn’t feel that way.
LUNA: You have such a specific sound across your songs. As brothers, how did you land on this as your lane?
DYLAN: I think it’s writing the songs we want to hear. We make a lot of music and produce a lot of music for other artists, and Rebounder is our favorite stuff. It’s purely egotistical—we’re just trying to please ourselves, making the song we like.
NOAH: There are certain bands we grew up listening to that will always be part of the DNA of the music—maybe some of those would be considered indie, maybe not. Growing up in New York, you go to a lot of shows, it all gets thrown into a pot and a stew and it comes out in its own weird way. We've been fond of the word “indie” for a long time, probably to an extreme point where it's become a bit of a punchline. But indie rock will forever be the genre we say when people ask what kind of music we make.
LUNA: Early press described you as “bedroom pop.” Do you feel like you’ve outgrown that label, especially with this new album?
DYLAN: I think “bedroom pop” is a word that’s become like “indie sleaze”—it doesn’t really have much meaning left. It just means you make a softer-sounding song and you’ve heard of The Strokes. We have four-on-the-floor disco songs, we have soft songs—we’re always trying to keep evolving. I’m not mad at anyone throwing a title on us, but I don’t know if it’s really stuck.
NOAH: If you take the literal definition of making music in your bedroom, then yes—most of these songs were born from demos made in one of our actual bedrooms, so there is a DIY thing that makes a title like that make sense for us. It’s just come to mean a lot of other things too, so it’s hard to say at this point.
I remember hearing a Phoenix interview where they talked about being the first generation of artists who could self-produce records and build a studio in their bedroom—literally translated from French. Even though they were the first generation to actually record at home, no one calls them bedroom pop. We built our own studio, but we still do a ton of writing and recording at home—vocals in my bedroom, in the kitchen, wherever. You can tell the difference between something that’s a glossy LA studio project and something that’s two guys in a kitchen with no Wi-Fi. That’s part of the vibe.
LUNA: What does that actual process look like—writing and producing your own songs?
DYLAN: We do it every kind of way. A lot of Rebounder songs start with me having some kind of track—a musical idea, maybe some lyrics or melody, maybe not—and I take it as far as I can, then send it to Noah. He’ll write on it or take it somewhere else and send it back, and I’ll have to delete my part because his is better. Then we get together, close the laptop, get an instrument, make it for real and go back and forth. It’s a lot of sitting around making tracks, trying to find interesting sounds or melodic ideas—not a ton of sitting behind a piano in the same room, though we've done that a couple times on this record too.
LUNA: With the album out soon, where do you want it to take you? Are you touring?
DYLAN: We’re hoping to announce tour dates for the end of the year, which we’re working on right now. We got to play in England for the first time a few months ago, which was amazing. We just want to play a lot of shows and get to a place where we can make another album pretty quickly after this one. There are songs on this record we think we could be playing for a long time in front of crowds, and that would be a lot of fun. I don’t think we have a more specific goal than that.
NOAH: We’re doing a show on the day the album comes out [November 6], at Nightclub 101 in New York.
