COOL KIDS
#2: LAVEDA
★★★★★★★
I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later – because I did not belong there, did not come from there – but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
– Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That
The frantic exhaustion of trying to keep up with everyone in New York is exciting and romantic, yet so overwhelming. … It’s easy to forget who you really are, because you can be anything.
– Laveda, Love, Darla track-by-track album notes
Working in music is a lot of doing everything, being everywhere, at all once. I love leaving the city. Sleeping in a tent in Missouri. Swimming in my pool in Dallas. Ignoring. Then it’s back to the whirlwind. I can’t deny that I have a lot of fun. Always trying to figure something out. Taking calls while getting my hair washed at the salon. In the shower. Stepping outside while having drinks with my friends at the bar. Consider it a 24/7. It keeps smelling like fall around me. Almost Christmas. Already excited to go home and take it all in.
Laveda is
Ali Genevich (vox/guitar/bass/synth)
Jacob Brooks (guitar/bass/synth/vox)
Dan Carr (bass/guitar)
Joe Taurone (drums)
Newest release: Love, Darla, junior album, September 12, 2025
★★★★★★★
Marisa Whitaker: How’s it going?
Jacob Brooks: Going to Vegas.
MW: Are y’all gonna gamble?
Ali Genevich: Maybe.
Joe Taurone: I think so.
MW: Did y’all drive from New York? God bless you.
AG: We’re on the road. We’re doing it.
MW: I love it. For starters, I love the album. Congrats. It’s sick. I first heard of you guys from Monobloc. They said great things. This is y’all’s third record, which is wild. How do y’all feel about this being your third record and y’all being so young?
AG: It’s ambitious, in a sense, but it also feels somewhat natural.
JB: I feel like every album we make is our first one.
AG: Yeah, it does feel like that a little bit. We like to create a new vibe for each record, at least that’s what we’ve been doing so far. It really doesn’t feel like our third album. It feels like a first album. We joked about it, actually. I was like, Should we be a new band for this album? And everyone was like, No. It’s the same band. It felt very fresh.
MW: It’s definitely a departure from your other sounds. It’s very punk, it’s very 90s, which I love. I was reading the track-by-track album notes, and I gathered that when y’all were making it, it was more musically driven than it was lyrically driven.
AG: Yeah, I would say so. Generally, our records are, across the board, more musically driven, but the lyrics are much freer on this record compared to previous releases. There are a couple of lines in a couple of songs that are very out there. Very much up for interpretation.
MW: You mean they’re not so much based on experience, it’s more just word vomiting, for lack of a better word?
AG: Yeah, there’s a little bit of that. A lot of it is me trying to describe a feeling. It’s very poetic; like hyper interpretive poetry, I guess, but not anything super concrete. The music is definitely more the focus; the sonics of everything. Lyrics were very much secondary.
MW: I love that approach. Not everybody does that. In what ways is the album, lyrically, reflective of you guys as individuals and where you are in life right now, in your 20s?
AG: “Care,” specifically, the opening track on the album, has this youthful rage about it that is really …
MW: Ah, you’re cutting out.
AG: We’re literally in the mountains.
MW: I’m jealous.
AG: As I was saying, “Care” has a youthful energy to it.
MW: It gives Dandy Warhols a little bit, with the intro.
AG: Oh, yeah. The feedback and stuff. That song encapsulates how I feel right now, when I’m in New York: Walking through the city, kind of doing nothing, but feeling like you’re doing everything at the same time.
MW: I loved what you said about it in your little write-up. You described first moving to New York; you think it’s so romantic and cool, but it’s so overwhelming. You said: It’s easy to forget who you really are, because you can be anything. Talk to me about that, especially as an artist and working in the music and art world, and the chaos that comes with it. It can be super chaotic, and you can be a different person every day if you want to. There are so many groups of people and different types of people, and it’s like, Who am I? Where do I fit into all of this?
AG: It’s something I struggle with every day. Some days I feel like I’m on top of the world, like, I’m doing it – I’m out here making music and doing what I love. Then some days, it’s just so overwhelming, having to balance that with everyday life, other things that I may want. You’re constantly being pulled in a million directions. You’re going to parties, you’re going to shows, you’re waking up early to go do something crazy. It’s easy to lose your sense of self because you’re just doing so much sometimes. But that’s what’s nice about music – it’s grounding. You can work on something, and when you open it back up again, whether it be the next day or days later, it puts you back into that same headspace that you were in before. That can help me find my sense of self; remember why I’m doing what I’m doing.
MW: I know what you mean. In what ways would you all say that New York serves young artists? What are the positives of living in such a city as a young artist?
JB: It’s my favorite city.
AG: The community is unmatched.
JB: We even have an all-ages venue in Ridgewood, which just seems like such a hard thing to find in a lot of other cities. An actual community of people is allowed to do whatever the hell they want to do. A lot of places throughout our country put a lot of limitations on people, whether it be venues you can go to, or things you can do, age restrictions, and all that. I think that’s really fucking lame. Even ticket prices, too. It’s crazy sometimes how expensive things can be. There’s so much in New York that there’s room for everyone and every type of person to experience music and to be a part of a bigger community, which is super accessible. You just get on the fucking train and go.
MW: What would you say is the flip side of that? In what ways is the city damaging for young people?
AG: I go through a cycle, when I live anywhere, where when things feel new and exciting, that’s when I feel most inspired to write music. What will be most challenging for me is being in the same place and writing new material, finding something new to draw inspiration from, in the same city. There’s so much there, so I’m sure I’ll find it. I’m just not sure yet.
★★★★★★★
MW: “Cellphone” is such a good song. I really love it. What was the feeling when y’all nailed that song? Did you know it was a good one?
AG: Jake and I were actually in LA when we demoed it with our friend Dylan. It’s one of the only songs on the record we really did that for. Dylan didn’t work on the record with us, but we were all jamming, and once we had a demo of it fleshed out – it happened pretty quickly – I just remember Dylan being really excited about it, and I was excited too. I was like, This is pretty catchy. There’s no way that I wrote this. We were driving around the Hollywood Hills, bumping the demo in Dylan’s convertible. We were like, This is so sick. It was a really fun moment for all of us. When we showed the guys, Joe and Dan, they were like, Yeah, this is sick. It was pretty easy to record. Actually, no, I take that back. It wasn’t easy to record.
JB: It was the hardest one.
AG: It was the hardest song to record because it has such a slacker rock energy to it. We were so well rehearsed, and we were really trying really hard to make it sound perfect. Dan was like, Guys, we’re trying too hard. We just need to slack off. And then we got it. It is funny, quite literally, he was like, We just need to stop trying. And then it was fine.
MW: That’s when the gold happens.
AG: I wanted to change the lyrics to make them have a little more substance. I thought they were cool, and I was worried maybe that other people would say all these are totally thrown together, lazy writing. Jake, you were like, Just leave it. And I have gotten that comment, but I don’t care.
MW: Well, fuck that. The lyrics are cool. I also read that you’ve talked about being overstimulated and being overinformed. The song’s about social media a little bit, right?
AG: Yeah. Being online all the time, seeing comments, not even things necessarily about you, or anything related to your life, just seeing people on the internet interacting with each other. The line, I don’t need to know that my hair looks like a boy. It has that spirit of, You’re on your phone; you see something you didn’t need to see. You don’t need to know about someone else’s opinion all the time. It’s just too much. Can’t we just do anything else?
MW: This hive mind mentality can foster on social media and be projected and revolutionized in real time. It’s weird when online shit takes on a life of its own in person, when I don’t think it was necessarily meant to be that way to begin with. There are so many plus sides, obviously. Being a musician in this world, there’s more exposure and all that. In what ways have you accepted social media, being a young musician today, and how does it serve you?
AG: The connection with other artists is unmatched. Already on this tour, we’ve played with so many bands that we wouldn’t know about if we didn’t have the internet and DMs on Instagram. It’s so, so sick. We’re constantly listening to new music all the time. Even at home in New York, it’s helpful too. It is truly a place where you can use it as a tool, foster new relationships. We met one of our video directors, Adam, and his partner, who both worked on our video, on Instagram. He DM’d me, Do you want to work together on some stuff? And I was like, That could be cool. Let’s get coffee. The rest was history. Now they’re our great friends. Social media is not all bad. It’s getting to the other side of it: We found each other here. Now, let’s be together in a room. Otherwise, it sucks the soul out of you.
★★★★★★★
MW: You mentioned earlier that there are some songs on the album with personal, real lyrics. What songs were you referring to?
AG: “Lullaby.” I wrote that about getting off the train and walking to my serving job. I have a 15-minute walk after I get off the M, and I remember specifically, after I wrote it, this time I was walking and thinking about my partner. I was like, Damn, I hope they’re thinking about me right now. It was one of those moments where you’re not talking to them, but you’re thinking about them, and you’re like, I wonder what they’re doing. Also, “I Wish.” It’s funny because it’s actually about my friend. She was in such a toxic relationship for a while, and I was really worried about her. I was like, Damn, you need to get out of this. One time we hung out, it was after they had broken up, and she was telling me about everything. I wrote the song the next day. That was me tapping into her brain, I guess. When you have such a close friend, sometimes you don’t know how to tell them, This is bad. When it’s over, you’re like, I was so fucking worried. And they’re like, I’m so glad this is over, and I’m so glad I’m good now. Maybe I wish that I had told her before. I was feeling weird about that.
MW: I was talking to my friends about relationships the other day. I’m 25, and looking back, we’ve all gone through maybe a couple of relationships, or not at all, but we learn from each experience. Come out the other side a bit bigger each time. Trying to date and do any of that in the city now is fucked too, but having your friends’ back is vital. Dealing with your own relationships is hard, especially here. Apparently, New York is the worst dating city.
AG: Oh, yeah. I’ve been locked down for a little bit, but my friends always say it sucks to date here. I don’t know what it is.
MW: I’ve seen dumb studies on Instagram, maybe they’re not real, but saying that more 50-year-olds are getting laid than 20-year-olds right now. What do you think? Do you think it has to do with social media? Is it an artist thing?
JT: I gotta turn 50. Right fucking now.
JB: Our world is so hyper-personalized. Where we almost don’t really need other people.
[Laughs.]
JB: I obviously don’t believe that.
AG: I know what you mean. It’s so hyper-personalized that people are like, There has to be somebody else that’s just like me out there. But, really, there isn’t. You can have all these niche things that you really like, and people are really quick to be like, Well, we don’t match up in every single category, so I’ll just find somebody else.
JB: Like Ted from How I Met Your Mother. He’s always like, She’s not right. He’s like Goldilocks.
MW: That’s so funny. I’m rewatching that right now.
★★★★★★★
MW: If you were to listen to this album five years from now, how would you think that you guys did a good job capturing who y’all are right now, in the time you made the album?
AG: It captures the feeling of my moving to New York. Even though I had been there a lot before, everything was new because I was living there. I wasn’t leaving at the end of the day. I don’t know if I would say feeling trapped, but fully being a part of this crazy city. I think that feeling will come every time I listen to it. Like when you find an old bottle of perfume in a weird drawer in your bedroom, and when you smell it, the memories flood back. It’s pretty cool because I don’t necessarily feel that way about our first two records. I could be wrong. Only time will tell.
MW: What was it like for you guys to explore a new sound? Do you enjoy playing it live?
AG: It’s the most fun that we’ve collectively all had as a band playing together live. The sound was shaped by all of us. We didn’t really have very full-fledged demos when we started it. The songs were there, but so much changed after we all started playing the songs together. We figured out what the sound was going to be through rehearsal.
MW: Do you think that you’re gonna stay more in this lane? Or do you think you want to experiment with sound yet again for the next album?
AG: I’m interested in what we’ve found. We could do something like this again, for sure. Whatever we make next is going to be more like this record than our previous records. But, I don’t know, I’m kind of a wild card when it comes to music, so I can’t promise anything.
JB: I agree. Ali’s unpredictable.
AG: It could be a full acoustic record.
MW: That’d be a crazy left turn.
AG: I have so much fun playing loud, fast music. If it’s not one, then it has to be the other.
★★★★★★★
MW: What all do you want to do while you’re young and you’re able to do it? At the end of the day, everyone can be young. I know 60-year-olds who act like they’re 20. But while we have these bodies and stamina and all that, what all do you guys have left to achieve, musically and personally?
JB: Having a younger body is good for touring. Sleeping on floors and shit. Every time I’m like, We’ve gone on tour, and someone’s like, How old are you? That’s when you’re supposed to be going on tour, when your back doesn’t hurt. I want to keep traveling as much as possible. Doing the thing.
AG: Not to piggyback off of you, but I would agree. I love doing this. It’s really fun. It’s tiring as shit, and it’s a lot of hard work, but it’s awesome. You can’t do it forever, unless you get stupid, crazy rich and famous, which I don’t need that, but if you’re old, then you need a bus. When you’re young, you can get a van.
MW: Are y’all in a van? Or is that a car? Y’all are packed in there. What’s the craziest thing that’s happened so far?
Dan Carr: We met these two boys on the street who were trying to influence; they’re TikTokers. Anyway, we were loading out, and they’re shining their phone flashlights in our face, asking us if we wanted to have children, and all these crazy questions.
AG: Also, this isn’t crazy, but we went to a Savers in Rochester during the very beginning of our tour. I went back inside because I was like, Guys, I didn’t bring my yoga mat. Let me go see if there’s a yoga mat in Savers. And then I came out with a Razor scooter. Now, we’ve been riding the Razor scooter.
JB: We put the GoPro on the Razor scooter. And we set up cones in the parking lot, weaving in between the cones. That was pretty awesome.
MW: That’s probably a better workout, at the end of the day.
AG: Honestly. Those are the things that you can do when you’re in your 20s that you might not be able to do when you’re old.
MW: Trade a yoga mat for a Razor scooter.
★★★★★★★