A prodigal punk band returns with fresh feelings, fresh stories, and a fresher sound.
SAMUEL HYLAND
Night had long settled over Los Angeles, and Genesis Evans, 27, was loitering on the sweat-soaked ballroom floor of El Cid, fingers crossed for an off-chance link-up with Dyltwosix. If you’ve lingered at any venue fifteen minutes past lights-out, this might be a familiar image: a haphazard gaggle of nervous fans, each honing shaky sales pitches—Hey, great set! I loved the EP you put out in 2017, that shit was so raw bro… By the way, I’m an experimental rapper based in Lawndale—in their heads. Evans had a pitch, too. By that evening in April, he’d been halfway through recording Blair II, the long-awaited debut album of Blair, his New York rock outfit. Half a decade prior, they’d exploded out of Brooklyn’s skate scene with grimy guitar epics, less indebted to sharp-edged structure than emotional release. (Picture a minute-long Jerry Springer Show soundbite, an extended lounge-rock interlude, and the most depressing—and cacophonous—call-and-response you’ve ever heard. Now, picture it on a bill with MIKE or Wiki.) “Genres are so wack,” guitarist Paulie Ocampo Zapata scoffed one September afternoon in 2020, outside the band’s shoddy rehearsal facility. “They never really served a purpose other than to separate music.”
“I’m a new person now. I’ve seen new things. I feel a new way. If anyone is not happy about me being happy, I don’t care.”
Four years later, Evans resonated with this sentiment—maybe even more than he did then. Not long after Blair released Tears to Grow (2021), he self-produced 8 SONGS (2022), a collagist debut project that threaded chipmunk soul to drowsy sampledelia. With the band seemingly on hiatus, its members’ musical ideas outgrew emo confines; in little time, Evans was floating the idea of autotune. And tonight, at El Cid, he was lurking in the post-show stench of a beer-stained ballroom, waiting for Dyltwosix to emerge from backstage: not because he wanted a co-sign, but because he wanted a rap verse for a rock album, which wasn’t necessarily a rock album, but a weird, modernist other thing that stuffed fuzz pedals, 16-bar sets, autotune, and acoustic arpeggios into the same damn song. “Whatever it is we do,” singer-guitarist Nico Chiat said over Zoom this past August, a week or so before Blair II hit streaming platforms. Whatever it is they do—and these days, it’s what they’ve always done. Whatever they want, with whatever they have.
High up on the “have” list: a much better mood. When Blair gained rapport in pandemic-era New York, tastemakers were eager to loop them under “emo” or “alternative punk,” which was understandable—as much as they’d denied genre conformity, their formula largely comprised squeals, strums, and raw, squinty-eyed suffering. This was attractive, in part, because it seemed to grace its scene with fresh modes of being honest: here were these guitar-slinging Tompkins-dwellers, spiking Brooklyn’s introspective rap universe with broken strings and shattered cymbals. By drummer Anysia Batts’s departure in 2022, they’d scattered a modest eight songs across two one-off singles and just as many EPs. For all its sparseness, the slight sample size packed a walk-in closet’s worth of difficult baggage. (“I thought things someday would change / I guess it’ll always stay the same,” a 23 year-old Evans howls on “Nothing Helps,” drowning in overdrive. “I never thought at all. I feel so very small.”) Today, they aren’t as angsty as they were all those years ago. And they’re adamant that the music shouldn’t be, either. “First of all, that shit’s old as shit,” Evans said of Blair’s early work, hosting the group’s impromptu meeting-room in his painting-decked apartment. “I’m a new person now. I’ve seen new things. I feel a new way. If anyone is not happy about me being happy, I don’t care.”
“It’s super easy to talk about sad shit.”
For all it’s worth, it doesn’t sound like the band does, either. Take “Newdesigner,” the bubbly FearDorian-assisted cypher that resulted from Evans’ El Cid stakeout. Queue it up at Guitar Center, and make room for the old-minded uncle dragging his nephew out the door: a sample-happy omnivore, no stranger to the art of the Bar Italia flip, melding acoustic campfire-pluckage with liquidish, auto-tuned rap verses. It’s a jarring departure from Blair’s sullen first act, but one that retains its collegiate reference points—the dusky clatter of skate parks, the fretful heartbeat of unsent DMs, the alien comfort of winters braved beneath trusty ill-fitting coats. Evans swears that Dyltwosix “recorded his shit in, like, ten minutes,” which poses an interesting caveat to another claim he swears by: “It’s super easy to talk about sad shit,” he shrugged, to silent head-nods. Maybe it’s easy to talk about happy shit, too. The hard part is believing in it.
Blair comprises Ocampo Zapata, 31, Chiat, 27, Evans, and drummer Abbas Muhammad, 29. Their newest album bears the intimacy of a fireplace chat, and their conversation isn’t so different—ask one member a question about himself, and within thirty seconds, he’ll be on his third shout-out to his third band-mate. If this debut full-length is to be considered a sequel to Blair (2019), the eponymous EP that put them on the map, then there’s growth in the fact that this time around, the “shout-out” list is considerably longer. The record collages bits and pieces from a number of once-dormant demos; aside from Dyltwosix and FearDorian, it also features contributions from DORIS, the prolific Brooklyn rapper-slash-artist, and Photographic Memory, the guitar wizard who’s shared stages and studios with the likes of Jane Remover and quannnic. Holistically taken, it offers a unique take on indie rock’s future, maybe not solely for its formulaic departures. Where their back-catalog evoked familiar punk scenery—noisy post-midnights in sweat-soaked rehearsal spaces—the new material sounds as if you planted a microphone in four different bedrooms, took the best parts from each recording, then spliced them into a coherent narrative, sort of like those phone-call scenes from Mean Girls, except the girls have guitars and they aren’t nearly as sadistic. By 2024, multi-track recording isn’t a novel concept: you don’t necessarily need to have met in real life to be a rock band. But in Blair’s freshly-spirited universe, a song is less studio-engineered than scrapbooked, a stitched-together showcase of old relics in new contexts. “The feelings being brought up by the songs coming out today are so new,” Chiat said, shortly after lauding FearDorian, AyooLii and Polo Perks’ genre-androgynous joint album A Dog’s Chance. “Things have become so hard to pinpoint. Anything goes.”
“Music is all about the timing and the people. Any riff can become anything imaginable. But it becomes what it becomes because of who the people are.”
It’s a stochastic sentiment, corroborated by the fidgety few weeks that preceded Blair II’s release: rife with last-minute edits, one accidental leak, and quite a few unanswered pleas for streaming services to allow post-release tinkering. “From my perspective, this album was actually officially done like, maybe… two days ago?” Muhammad said, less than a week before drop day. “I joined last year. Something that’s inspired me is that throughout this entire recording process, they were constantly tweaking stuff and adding things. They were never like, Alright, this is what it is. It’s just done. They just kept adding stuff, for the sake of experimentation. You never know what you’re going to stumble upon.”
“As you go on, you keep things you really like,” Ocampo Zapata added. “You’re like, I know this is for something, and I don’t know what it’s for yet, but I’ve got to keep trying to figure it out. Music is all about the timing and the people. Any riff can become anything imaginable. But it becomes what it becomes because of who the people are.”
There’s an endless trove of riffs that didn’t make Blair II, and among them, four wound up comprising EP—a one-off June project by Chiat and Ocampo Zapata, teeming with mosh-able versions of acoustic songs they’d written years prior. “They were just kinda… there. And we were like, Okay, we should just record them before they get lost forever,” Chiat said over the phone, a few hours after Blair II came out. The tape is far removed from the new, more wistful iteration of their main project, though its raucous gut-punch feels familiar: deafeningly razor-edged, even if the songs aren’t entirely doom and gloom. “I think we just wanted to have a space where we could play loud music.”
Two minutes into “Someone Else,” Bracelet’s searing opening track, scattered arpeggios fester into a supercharged denouement, Ocampo Zapata’s drawl draping the clamor like a coarse quilt. If Bracelet is a microcosm of Blair, it’s fitting for its sound to borrow the band’s ingredients, even if from an earlier era: decibels and deep-seated passion, except now, the “passion” is outward-facing love—a far cry from their bedrock of inward-facing hatred. In its closing segment, a spirited appeal is lobbed towards an unspecified interest:
You are my
My favorite car ride
To take with eyes closed.
Take me home
take my life
Take me home.
The longer you sit with it, the more Ocampo Zapata’s plea might register as a fuck-everything nosedive, barreling towards wherever its anonymous subject—or he and Chiat’s breakneck tremolo—may fall. It’s unusually beatific for a screamo song, maybe because of how willing it is to redirect the genre’s scorched-earth determinism: still existing at terminal velocity, but not so much tumbling towards death as free-falling through life. A car ride with eyes closed is thrilling, after all—it only means you aren’t driving. No one in Blair really is. “We’re all just trying to… do it,” Chiat said, searching for specifics before settling on a catch-all. “Whatever it may be.”
🌎🌎🌎
“I feel like people are always saying Oh, let’s start a band drunkenly, or some shit. And it never happens. But for us, it did.”
Blair II’s cover art was taken from the vast archive of Marc Chiat, a California polymath whose work bled into every cranny of his—and, by extension, Nico’s—life. Nico shared his childhood home with a lineage of nomadic art objects: pencils, pens, and knicknacks, sprawling across unclaimed surfaces, begging to be picked up and used. Among these tempting items was an electric guitar, owned by the senior Chiat and borrowed, with increasing interest, by his curious son. In elementary school, Nico played strings in an upstart band called The Coffee Filters, who graced Los Angeles’s 10-and-under scene with heartfelt renditions of cross-generational classics. (Come for The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” stay for MGMT’s “Kids.”) By middle school, he’d commenced a head-first plunge into the skate universe raging beyond his bedroom window. “It totally took over my life,” he said, over the phone. “I was obsessed. You can just be outside all the time, you know? We were kids in Los Angeles, and we’d take the bus to every single part of the city. I was obsessed with that: covering as much ground as I could.”
“I’m really thankful that I gravitated towards emo and punk, because it really kept my heart intact. It was a good way to express myself without losing myself.”
As a fledgling skateboarder, Chiat joined a flashy litany of young Fairfax loiterers, half-assing homework by day and filming street epics by night. In one of the earliest mini-movies posted to his YouTube channel, a young Chiat and friends—Sean Pablo, Sage Elsesser, Aidan Mackey—take to California’s beaches, playgrounds, and dilapidated alleyways, trying (and miserably failing) ambitious tricks like lanky foals learning to stand up straight. It’s endearing in a nostalgic way, though slightly more impressive, optics considered: Tumblr-era teenagers, median age 15, conquering unmanned territories then relentlessly self-publishing their triumphs. You wonder where—or whether—they ever found space to study for the next day’s exams. “Wow i go to that middle school,” one comment on the video reads.
Largely as skateboarding loomed over his teenage years, Chiat hadn’t forgotten about his burgeoning musical interests. Perhaps he didn’t have much of a choice: there’s well-documented crossover between skate scenes and punk ones, and his generation of LA class-skippers—notable alumni: Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, Na-kel Smith—was far from exempt. “Playing guitar and making music were things we’d just do when we got back home,” Chiat said. “We would just mess around. Try to play punk songs, like Joyce Manor or Minor Threat. I got really into that kind of stuff.” Across the country, Evans, then a teenager working at Supreme’s Lafayette Street location, was getting into that kind of stuff, too. He’d been a local legend in his own right, revered as the tricked-out main character of his cult-favorite YouTube channel: a bespectacled ripper, tearing through Manhattan’s railings and traffic cones like something out of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. As up-and-comers in the U.S. skate circuit’s coastal capitals, Chiat’s and Evans’s enclaves were well aware of one another. It was one of many reasons why Chiat, having grown bored of his local high school and graduated online, wanted to visit New York.
“I was just at the right place at the right time.”
In 2017, accompanied by his dad and his brother, he got his wish. “I met Genny on that trip,” Chiat said. “We had been talking on, like, YouTube and Tumblr. We were already friends on the internet. And then when I got to New York on that first trip, I was like, Let’s skate! We ended up skating for three days straight.” By year’s end, he’d made a permanent move to the city, couch-surfing with friends while sharing Evans’ Supreme store day-job. “That’s when we started… not Blair, but making music together,” he recalled. “We would just talk about music and quitting [our jobs]. I would go to his house after work, and we would teach each other songs.”
“I remember with one of my first paychecks I got working at Supreme, I bought a guitar,” Evans said, in a separate phone call. “I remember asking Nico if he could teach me a Dinosaur Jr. song. He was also trying to teach me ‘Creep.’ I was super intimidated about playing guitar for mad long. I feel like people are always saying Oh, let’s start a band drunkenly, or some shit. And it never happens. But for us, it did.”
Part of the pair’s luck can be attributed to Ocampo Zapata, a seasoned singer-slash-guitarist who, per Chiat, had “been in, like, a million bands.” An adopted son, he’d grown up in the Long Island of the aughts, a simmering hotbed for punk upstarts like Brand New and Crime in Stereo. “I think music really gave me a sense of identity,” he said in a phone call. “And I’m really thankful that I gravitated towards emo and punk, because it really kept my heart intact. It was a good way to express myself without losing myself. I was already so different—and I already stood out so much—that I was never really afraid to experiment with things, whether it was music, clothes, or makeup. All throughout high school and college, I was just always trying new stuff.” What he felt he lacked in identity, his adoptive parents made up for in leeway: a laissez-faire approach, few limitations placed on what a teenaged Ocampo Zapata could do, where he could go, and who he could travel with. “In a way,” he said, “they knew I needed something more than the life I was put into.”
“I really enjoyed it all. But learning that [Blair] was the first band that a majority of them had ever been in… it made it that much more impressive.”
Ocampo Zapata earned his Bachelor’s degree upstate, at a four-year institution revered for its hulking music-business program. (Over text, he requested that the school go unnamed: “Don’t want them gettin no clout.”) Post-graduation, he moved to Brooklyn with his girlfriend and collegiate band-mates, saving money and playing the occasional show. When things eventually stopped working out smoothly, he felt he’d hit rock bottom. “I really thought I was done,” he said. “I was like: I’ll probably not be in a band anymore. I’m getting older.” It wouldn’t be long before he learned of two nearby Supreme employees looking for a place to play their half-baked songs. “I was just able to be like, Hey, I have a practice space, do you guys wanna hang out? I’ve been dying to be in a band,” Ocampo Zapata continued. “I was just at the right place at the right time.”
Muhammad, Blair’s newest member, was at the right place at the right time, too. Growing up, he shared a Long Island hometown with Ocampo Zapata, cutting his teeth in its burgeoning hardcore underground. As the drummer of Scourge, a short-lived Huntington powerhouse, he played raucous opening sets for the likes of Touché Amoré and Trapped Under Ice—trawl the internet, and you might find blurry videos of those fabled shows, all flailing fists and bouncing bodies. By the time he settled down after college, Blair had long begun taking the boroughs by storm. “I really enjoyed it all,” he said of their early catalog in a phone call, “but learning that [Blair] was the first band that a majority of them had ever been in… it made it that much more impressive. Especially with Tears to Grow—I really saw them coming into their own. Then they kind of disappeared for a while.”
Through a mutual friend, he learned that they were on the prowl for a new drummer. Up to then, it had been Muhammad’s longest stretch since 14 years old without consistently being in a band—reason enough to say yes, buoyed by the fact that this particular band seemed on the cusp of potential he’d long believed in. In March of 2023, Chiat and Ocampo Zapata attended a show he played with a short-lived side-project, joined by Hotline TNT’s Mike Ralston and Fiddlehead’s Nick Hinsch. The next day, Ocampo Zapata reached out with a familiar proposition: “Hey, do you wanna come jam?” “I jammed with them that one time, and there was no real follow-up,” Muhammad said. “Then I ran into Paulie at this thing over the summer, and he was like, Yeah, we’re still figuring out what we want to do, still trying out other drummers. In my head, I was like, Oh come on, I know I’m such a good fit! But looking back, it was also a ginormous learning experience for me.
“I feel like I came from a more traditional approach to songwriting,” he continued. “And in retrospect, I was kind of going off the rails on the drums. But that’s not what I want to do. I want to serve the music in a way that makes sense, while also injecting my personality without being cumbersome.” That August, when Ocampo Zapata sent him demos for Blair II, he had his chance.
In September of 2020, a year or so before Tears to Grow, I met Blair in a dingy Brooklyn rehearsal facility bordering the East River. It was everyone’s first time doing this—my first time interviewing, their first time being interviewed—and it was awkward, mostly because of me. To the scrawny high-schooler fumbling a tape-recorder, they were demigods, blessing this teeny abode with the wiry detritus of their cool: battered pedals, cluttered guitar cables, mini-amps that buzzed like mechanized hornets. The space seemed too small for the sound it was being bludgeoned with. My bones felt it more than my ears heard it, which terrified me. When Ocampo Zapata met me outside a little after 5 PM, he’d led me down a narrow corridor peppered with identically-sized rooms, all boasting fancy hotel-ish scanner systems. Behind nearly every door was another band; the noise was amorphous and ghastly, as if you’d collected Manhattan’s mysterious late-night clankings and tossed them all—murders, garbage trucks, drunken shouts—into a vacuum that smelled like weed.
I observed them for an hour or so. The previous sentence is a lie. In reality, I was scared to make eye contact with anyone—or look up and bump into a stray guitar—so I mostly glared at the floor, taking trivial notes on unimportant scenery: Nico 3 pedals, Ibanez tube screamer. Light dim and yellow. THEY SWITCH INSTRUMENTS! I had only really watched them for ten minutes, generously, before we went outside. We got bored of walking, found a spot on four jagged rocks in Domino Park, sat down way too close to the water. (Rookie mistake: I was devastated to learn that my tape recording was mostly sloshing noises.) I asked them stupid questions, all of which they answered more politely than I deserved. I remember one of these more than the others. Desperate to seem educated, I hurled off a list of New York legends—the Ramones, the New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground—and stuttered into some weird thing about whether they’d seen themselves as part of a legacy. Everyone was quiet for a moment. Evans peered up at me with this confused look on his face. “We’re not really trying to be anyone else,” he said. “We’re just figuring it out together.”