Members New York City-based band Blair could benefit from knowing how to describe their music. The group’s sound intuitively moves through the Flaming Lips’ broad psychedelic rock ethos to pop punk, hip-hop, and even electronic music, all with a chemical cohesion. It’s the sound of your most eclectic but reliable friend controlling the assistant. “I’m waiting for people to give it a name,” Pauly Ocampo-Zapata, who plays guitar, drums, and bass in the band, says via Zoom. “You have to pick a genre on Bandcamp or whatever, and it’s like, ‘I don’t know which one to pick. It’s really hard.’”
The group's last album, Blair II It arrived last month and marks their first release since their 2021 EP. Tears growThe gap between releases is attributed to the typical growing pains of many bands in the 2020s: finding a new drummer and the COVID-19 pandemic slowed them down. Nico Chiat, who plays guitar and produces for the band, says it was also a chance for the group of old friends to grow as musicians. “The EPs we started putting out once we started were just learning how to make music together and record music,” he says. “The songs were us coming together and talking and writing in the moment. I feel like with this new record, there was no preconceived idea of what it was going to sound like, which is really exciting.”
Lead single “Propeller” kicks off the album with a slow Alex G-like tempo before morphing into something completely unexpected. The neo-metal guitar breakdown opens with a sultry riff from singer Genesis Evans, whose performance ranges from a straight-up rap to something you’d hear on a Deftones song. On the standout “Got2getoveru,” Evans strikes a balance between pop-punk vocals and something more contemporary. “I just wanted to make it a fast song, because I remember when we were doing that song, they came up with the guitar riff and I was just like, ‘I gotta get over you,’” Evans says. “I just wanted something catchy. Even on some Playboi Carti stuff or something like that.”
“We would start with a part of the song, like a melody, and then share it with each other,” Chiat adds. “There was no telling how the song was going to be done or when it was going to be done, or even what made the song end, and then we’d say, ‘Okay, it’s done now.’”
The result is something like lightning captured in a bottle, and it’s almost entirely Blair’s style. Even on the band’s previous releases, they place a premium on capturing something authentic. The group debuted around 2019 with a locally-released EP of the same name, a perfect distillation of Midwestern passion and the frenetic energy of New York, where all the band members are from. Two years later, Tears grow The song landed in the midst of the pandemic like a signal from the future. In just three songs, it captured an emotional resonance that crystallizes over time, a capsule of a moment of turmoil that the five boroughs were on the front lines of.
Now, with the addition of drummer Abbas Mohammed, the songs on their new album have a similarly eerie feel, as if they were coming from a shared memory. Like the “hybrid workplace” model of many offices in the post-pandemic world, the band says they made the album collectively and independently. Even before Covid, they rotated between roles without much of a hierarchy, so over the past few years they’d meet every few weeks and share what they were working on. “It was like bringing a microphone and an interface, just wherever we were,” Chiat recalls. “Nothing was very planned, but we made sure that if something came up, we’d be able to pick it up.”
That’s why the album feels all over the place, in the best possible way. Each member’s personality has the ability to stand on its own, and find a way to coexist with the other. “We’re trying different things,” Chiat says. “I don’t think we really talk about genres, but maybe we talk about influences and say, ‘Oh, I want these vocals to go to the end of the world.’” [Kanye West’s] “Runaway” or something like that. We'll say that kind of stuff, but we never talk about the genre.
“When we released the other songs, what happened was that Blair was put in a box of, ‘You guys are rock stars… you guys make sad songs and emotional songs.’ That reputation wasn’t necessarily where we always wanted to be,” Ocampo-Zapata adds. Now, though, they feel liberated: “All of these songs have our personalities all wrapped up in them. We’ve all filled in all the little gaps with little details and little things that we reference in our own lives. The songs are more in line with who we actually are as people in our everyday lives.”
