The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
Most people looking through their old high school yearbooks will find evidence of questionable haircuts, cringe-inducing fashion choices, and other parts of their personalities they’ve long moved on from. That was high school, and most everybody has grown up since then.
In some ways, though, today’s youth are aging faster than ever, and in 2019, their high school ideas and ventures are surprisingly confident and adult. Modern kids were raised with the internet, and are consequently used to having a digital audience, which has left them more comfortable navigating the contemporary media landscape they have shaped.
This has led to an influx of teenagers having a significant effect on pop culture. Khalid was 19 when he released American Teen, his stunning and undeniable debut album that topped the R&B chart and peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200. Billie Eilish just turned 17 a few months ago, but her upcoming debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, is one of the year’s most anticipated pop records. Lindsey Jordan, better known as Snail Mail, made one of 2018’s most revered indie albums, Lush, and she’s only 19.
Now, it’s Liily’s turn: The Los Angeles-based group has arrived, all of its members are less than two decades old, and they’re positioned to become one of the year’s most enthralling rock bands.
Based just on their new EP, I Can Fool Anybody In This Town, and the singles that preceded it, Liily have built themselves a Spotify audience of over 176,000 monthly listeners. This is all thanks to songs they have written during the past three years or so, when they weren’t too busy with biology homework or whatever else high schoolers are up to with today.
Young rock bands are all but guaranteed to face countless comparisons to the genre’s legendary acts, comparisons that may or may not be fair or worthwhile. However, as the band’s Charlie Anastasis told me, Liily’s youth gives them at least one advantage over the groups that came before them: Unlike guitar-wielding groups from the ’70s (or even the ’90s), streaming services have been readily available to Liily’s members for the majority of their music-consuming lives. They don’t have to rely on albums recommended to them from their local record store employee or dig for inspiration in crates, as Spotify has given them a substantially larger well from which to draw.
For Liily, this has resulted in an EP that both appreciates the past and isn’t limited by preconceptions. Whether the band is busting out the densely produced and groovy “Sepulveda Basin” or the quintuple-espresso-in-song-form “Toro,” Liily is proving that the only critics questioning the modern relevance of rock must not be listening to them.
Before the band headed to South By Southwest (and their appearance at the Shaky Knees Music Festival in May), I got on the phone with Anastasis, and we spoke about performing in LA, being compared to older rock bands, and what Liily have learned from Peter Matthew Bauer, their manager who is also as a member of The Walkmen.
I was just watching your video for “Sold,” and it made it seem like your live shows get pretty intense. Did you guys always have that energy on stage, or has it been a process to reach that level?
I think… yes and no. As we started to form our own sound and friendships with each other, I think it blossomed more. But even when we were playing our friend’s houses, there was always an element of energy. Over the past year, it’s grown exponentially, and I think it’s been one of our biggest strengths as of right now.
What’s it like when you guys are touring and not on stage? Do you have any wild or funny stories from the road?
I think the funniest thing about us is with the amount of energy we put into the shows, it takes it out of us quite a bit. So for the most part, we just lay as low as we possibly can. The other side of it is just touring now, it’s so f*cking cold outside, there hasn’t been much to do.
Does it feel different playing in Los Angeles than it does in other places?
Yeah, it definitely does. I credit that, though, to us being an LA band and most of our fans are from there, so they’re more comfortable with us. They know us more than people in, say, Davenport, Iowa. They’re more comfortable and aware of what our live show is. They feel more inclined to get involved with that rather than people in places that don’t know us. And we’re also on tour with another band right now, so it further makes the audiences question what’s happening on stage and just us in general. So yes it’s different, but it’s not… it’s a good different.
You’ve been playing the songs from the new EP live for some time now. How does it feel to have finally released the EP?
On the one hand, it feels very different. It came out a couple of days ago now while we’re still on tour, but even in that amount of time, there have been people coming that have started knowing the songs that we’ve been playing for… almost three years now on some of these songs. So that’s very different, but on the other hand, like I just said, we’ve been playing some of these songs for almost three years now, so it isn’t that different in the sense that we’re just playing them like we always play them.
You’ve been compared to a lot of rock bands, most of them older. But unlike them, you guys have grown up with the internet all of your lives. How do you think the access to all this technology, both in terms of making music and being able to listen to basically the entire history of music whenever you want, has changed your approach to rock?
That’s a good question. I’ve thought about this a little bit, and the conclusion that I’ve come to is I think having access to pretty much 100 years of recorded music, it tends to start defying genres, in terms of what people listen to and the identity they get from what type of music they listen to. Us and all of our friends, we don’t just listen to rock music. Our friends who would make jazz music or rap or R&B: they don’t just listen to their respective genre that they make. We’re able to listen to as much as we want and therefore take influence from that and all of it.
So right now, the songs we have are a very good screenshot of where we were at at the time that we recorded them. But, they were recorded about a year ago, and from that time to now, we’re in a very different place and listening to a lot of different music, and I’m sure that will be reflected in the next thing that we put out. So it’s very rock now, but who knows what it will be next and who knows what it will be in ten years.
Do you ever get tired of being compared to older rock bands or is that fine with you?
I mean, yeah, what are you going to do? People like to compare, and that’s okay. They compare us to one thing now, they’ll compare us to something later, and there’s nothing we can do about that. It’s all up for listener interpretation.
I understand that you guys are managed by Peter Matthew Bauer, formerly of The Walkmen, and, of course, he’s an indie rock veteran who has done some things I’m sure that you would like to do. What’s it been like having him on your side?
It’s hard to put into words how much he’s done for us and how much we all look up to him. Definitely one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life. We’ve actually even been covering “Little House Of Savages” on this tour. We wouldn’t be here without him. I can confidently say that.
I also noticed that the EP was produced by Mark Rankin, who has worked with Adele and Queens Of The Stone Age and other esteemed artists. Did you learn anything from him?
Yeah, we learned a lot working with Mark. One of the best aspects of working with him — especially for our first time doing anything in a studio that wasn’t just in our garage — was he doesn’t really wear the producer hat. He was just there being very supportive of what we wanted to do. I think what we learned from all of that is… we’ve planted our seeds way more firmly in the ground of what we like and what we don’t like now. He helped us see that we didn’t necessarily know what we were doing when we got in there, but now we have a stronger outlook on our recording and are more fearless, and I attribute a lot of that to him.
What have you learned from making and putting out your first project that you can carry over into your first full-length album?
That’s a good question too. Like I said before, I think we just know what we want now. I think on the EP, you’ll hear a band that was just eager to put out some music. Now that we have, we’ve matured more from it and we’ve grown.
You guys are all about to enter your twenties, and that’s a point where most people either start school or otherwise enter the next phase of their life. What’s the next big thing on the horizon for you guys?
I don’t know. As of right now, we have one last show on the tour we’re on right now and then we’re going to head to South By Southwest, and then next on the horizon is just to tour this EP relentlessly. We’ve started working on our album, and we’re going to try as hard as we can to finish it hopefully by this year, and then release an album that we’re completely and utterly proud of. That’s what I foresee in the future.
I Can Fool Anybody In This Town is out now via Flush Records. Get it here.
