Nat and Alex Wolff are booked and busy.
The brother duo, who first became known through Nickelodeon, have spent the past decade building increasingly stacked resumés — audiences might remember Nat from The Fault In Our Stars and Paper Towns, while Alex was making waves in Hereditary and the severely underrated 2021 indie Pig. Two things quickly become clear over the course of a Zoom interview, though — they genuinely love making music most of all, and they genuinely love doing so together.
“People joke that when you hang out with us together, you’re always third wheeling,” Nat jokes. Being in a creative partnership with a family member isn’t easy, but these two make it appear to be — they finish each other’s sentences, bicker playfully through WiFi issues, and predict each other’s answers to the questions posed to them.
The chat is centered around their latest single, “All Over You,” which has kicked off a new chapter in their musical journey as a duo. Like so many others, they found themselves at home during the pandemic, and spent a large period of time writing, re-working previously written songs, and planning to record. Then, when the time came to get into the studio, they made the most of their time. “We booked a short time in the studio and said, let’s make a record like how they did in the 70s. Let’s just go burn it out,” Nat explains.
“It’s harder when it’s just two people. We had to play everything,” Alex adds. “It was hard at times to do a song or two a day, but it was kind of refreshing.”
Their perspective on music art is wide-ranging — they mention Picasso and Ingmar Bergman a breath before praising Dua Lipa and Ariana Grande. They feel as inspired these days by neo-soul artist Laura Mvula as they do institutions The Beatles or Pink Floyd. There’s an easiness to the way they approach and discuss making music, not wanting to box themselves in, open to experimenting.
This upcoming album — no release date just yet — is set to be their first full-length project in over eleven years. Again, they’ve been busy — in addition to those aforementioned onscreen credits, Alex is set to appear in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (“One of the most fun experiences ever,” Alex says, “It was so fun. It was so relaxed — that’s the Nolan way”), while Nat recently wrapped an Amazon Prime dark comedy series opposite Christoph Waltz and Brittany O’Grady.
The two describe the process of recording the album as something that felt right, and was just ready to happen, rather than something as conscious as “getting the band back together,” so to speak. They constantly play music together. “It was a lot easier than we thought,” says Alex. “I think it won’t be this long of a break again.”
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