On a warm afternoon in March, I meet the members of the band Laundry Day at a studio space in Brooklyn as they rehearse their latest single, “Why Is Everyone a DJ?,” a raucous rock ballad about the epidemic of DJs hitting the nation. It’s the night before they head to Europe to open for Teezo Touchdown on a stretch of his EU tour, and there’s a palpable sense of excitement in the room. Like many of their new fans, Teezo found out about Laundry Day via their humorous videos on Instagram and TikTok, where they take on pop and indie hits like a devilishly self-aware a cappella troupe.
Adorned in a vintage T-shirt for the Fox series Glee, Jude Ciulla-Lipkin, the band’s lead singer, explains how they recently slid into the DMs of another superstar: Drake. “He followed us, and we were all on FaceTime, freaking out,” he explains. “We went to DM him because obviously, we’re going to say something, and he had already DM’d us, being like, ‘Crazy Stupid Love’ is a really good song. I think the first thing we wrote was ‘Is this real?’ And he’s like, ‘Yes, I really fuck with you guys. I’ve been watching your videos for a long time.’”
There are a lot of easy comparisons to make between Laundry Day and more parody-focused acts like Weird Al or the Lonely Island, but the deeper fans of the band’s goofier videos dig, the more they tend to realize there’s more to the group than jokes. “When you see our show, when you see us play live, you realize that it isn’t a joke,” Ciulla-Lipkin explains. “You realize that we’re actually a good band. We’re not playing covers when we play.”
Their new song balances humor sort of the same way early Blink-182 songs skirted the line between full-on goofing off and making a pop-punk banger. “I think lyrically we’re trying to do it the most in this new song. There’s little parts of it that are just trying to poke fun at certain things,” Ciulla-Lipkin says. “But it’s weird because we’ve been a band for so much longer than the videos of us have been popular.”
“It’s all just Laundry Day,” Henry Pearl, the band’s guitarist, interjects. “We’re fun guys.”
The four band members — Sawyer Nunes and Ciulla-Lipkin on vocals, Henry Weingartner on bass, and Pearl on guitar — met at New York’s Beacon High School in Midtown. They recall connecting around the beginning of their freshman year after identifying their similar musical sensibilities and tastes. The arts-focused school is home to state-of-the-art studio equipment, and before long, the nascent band gained attention throughout the halls, effectively “selling out” lunch-period shows where they’d perform for other classmates.
In 2018, they released their debut album, Trumpet Boy, independently before going on their first nationwide tour. A year later, they dropped their second studio album, Homesick, which was co-produced with Brockhampton’s Romil Hemnani. During their senior year of high school, they would play Austin City Limits and Camp Flog Gnaw, in addition to opening for the 1975 and Clairo. “That was a lot — 15 shows or something. We missed a month of school,” Pearl recalls. “We had to go to our principal that summer before school even started being like, ‘We’re going to miss this month of school.’ It’s crazy.”
By the time they were ready to graduate, they’d been booked to play Governor’s Ball. “Things had really ramped up, and we were starting to think we’re not going to college,” Nunes says. “Our parents freaked out, and that was a whole other thing. We all applied for them, but at that point, we knew we weren’t going. And then the pandemic happened. Ironically that made our decision seem less risky. A lot of other kids didn’t go to college right away.” It was around this time that TikTok and other short-form video platforms really began to take off.
“TikTok kind of happened in the middle of us growing up. We caught the beginning and ends of a lot of different eras just being our age. At first we didn’t even want to get TikTok, but now it’s like we’re so in it and taking it for what it is,” Nunes says. “I found so many amazing artists who I love just through them posting themselves playing whatever — I think in that way it’s cool. It is starting to become more about genuinely knowing someone.”
“I keep telling people it’s not intentional,” Ciulla-Lipkin adds. We just started filming ourselves doing funny skits kind of in the spirit of Odd Future and it started to connect.”
Their videos, which sometimes feature other creators (like this perfectly silly Drake cover featuring Veronika_iscool), come at a time when artists across the board seem to be struggling to keep up with the habits of the new generation. Whether it’s jumping on live streams with Kai Cenat or seeding TikTok with a viral dance, artists new and old are increasingly looking for ways to find exposure in this new online environment. “Now we’re playing our own game instead of playing anyone else’s,” Nunes says. “We literally have labels DM’ing us — not to sign us — be like, ‘Yo, would you want to work with some of our artists and sing their song?’ It is weird, but it’s great. Literally the stupidest version of ourselves.”
Still, the members of Laundry Day have real musical ambitions. Ciulla-Lipkin says an album will come eventually, though “the last thing we want to do is just shut down and grind out album. I think it’d be fun to do more individual singles as well.” Perhaps in line with the recent trend away from being overly mysterious, Laundry Day wants to stay on fans’ minds, and in their feeds. “I like the idea of just doing a song every couple of months or every month or something just to then be able to promote it,” he adds.
“The buzz phrase we throw around, which doesn’t really mean anything, but we just throw around the idea that we want to be ‘the biggest band in the world,’” Nunes says. “What would the biggest band in the world do right now? The biggest band in the world would go viral on TikTok all the time.”
Elizabeth Weinberg
Elizabeth Weinberg
Elizabeth Weinberg
