As Kakacek’s twangy guitar riffs echoed through a San Franciscan concert venue, I listened with a pang of nostalgia in my stomach that paralleled what the returning half of a road trip feels like. Steering towards familiarity, driving back home from somewhere faraway provokes a sense of comfort. There is an indefinable sentiment for returning to a place you have known seemingly forever, and Whitney’s sound accesses and unleashes that feeling through their live performances.
Upon the breakup of Smith Westerns in 2014, bandmates and best friends Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek founded the band Whitney. The two released their first album, Light Upon the Lake (2016), two years later. With no agenda and an eagerness to perform as much as possible, the boys set off to simply “play good shows and be good people” for the next few years. Whitney released their sophomore record Forever Turned Around (2019) on August 30th of this year.
I first heard the band at an end-of-summer barbeque as my friends and I chatted about our approaching senior year of high school. Light Upon the Lake was the quintessential soundtrack for playing cornhole, sipping beer, and reminiscing about youth as we all turned eighteen over the next few months. Moving forward to Forever Turned Around, it feels, again, like a culmination of sorts.
Having expressed a playful sense of mortality and a firm belief that the world is going to end by 2050, the boys of Whitney create music that is honest and vulnerable. Through this vulnerability, tenderness and warm affection grows for Ehrlich’s highly distinguishable falsetto voice as he croons about the evolution of relationships and challenges of drifting away from past loves and friendships.
Be sure to check out Whitney’s cover of “Magnet” by NRBQ if you’re looking for a new song to boogie to. And don’t forget to listen to Whitney’s new album next time you find yourself driving up Highway 1 back to Berkeley. Play “Rhododendron” as you watch the waves crash along Big Sur’s jagged cliffs and ponder your mortality.
Article and Photos by Olivia Winck