youbet is a Band You Should Know
youbet is a band of good music and even better people.
Micah Prussack, one half of the youbet brain, welcomed me into her home first with an offer of fresh coffee. She recently purchased a Chemex and has been experimenting with mastering the ratio of coffee to water. Right now, she weighs three to four scoops of coffee and multiplies that number by fifteen to obtain the water measurement. Trial and error, she tells me, is the best way to sneak up on perfection.
She also has two crochet frogs that serendipitously match both her coffee cups, purchased in a completely different state than the mugs.
This concept is not foreign to Micah and bandmate Nick Llobet. Their four-year collaboration was seamless in many ways, but like all things good and worthy in this world, it took some meticulous adjusting. ‘Working together was never an automatic thing,’ Micah tells me. ‘There was something elemental about the way we wanted to collaborate, but we had to learn to play to each other’s strengths and build a healthy relationship.’
Nick started youbet as a solo project and released his first album three weeks before the global COVID-19 lockdown. The timing couldn’t be worse, and his momentum was significantly stymied. But something — maybe cosmic, maybe fateful, maybe just plain lucky — happened when he saw Micah playing with another band she was a part of. Everything clicked. He cited her impeccable onstage banter as the clincher: ‘She was the whole package, she was so funny,’ he said, smiling. ‘I had this whole vision watching her play.’
Together, they’ve doctored a sound that is utterly lived-in: cascades of wiry guitar textures and grainy distortion folding into something equal parts restless and intimate. There’s an inexplicable looseness, but never sloppiness, to their craft. Songs on their newest self-titled EP stretch and splinter before snapping back into place, as if they’re being discovered in real time: sonic ground somewhere in between meticulously constructed and wonderfully instinctual. It’s exciting, it’s resolved, and it’s new.
When first working together, he learned that Micah’s specific set of skills complemented his exquisitely. ‘I wasn’t prepared to have my world rocked in terms of figuring out how to run this machine,’ he raved. ‘It was a whole new chapter of sustainability. It’s nice to have someone around who is able to pull you out of the trench that you can so easily fall into when working in this industry.’ The impression left on me was that Micah, in addition to being a smashing guitarist, was a sort of logistical wizard. She was an expert communicator, extremely well-versed at navigating most of the behind-the-scenes work. It was an art Nick had never quite mastered, and Micah was happy to step in.
As we sat together in Micah’s Bed-Stuy apartment, with her fourteen-year-old cat Valerie Solanas curled up on a pillow beside her, the two told me the band had just returned from a five-week tour with Remember Sports. ‘It was one of the most successful tours we’ve ever had,’ they shared. When I asked why, Micah replied, ‘We were drinking Guinness in the green room, and I was just thinking, this is the life!’ However cheeky, this is quite evidently the principle that grounds youbet’s career. ‘It’s not always about the money,’ Micah added. ‘Of course, breaking even is nice, but every jump you make is going to be twice as hard as the last one. We don’t have any grand illusions about what we’re doing, and we’re not trying to make a crowd-pleasing, groundbreaking pop album that will achieve instant virality. We’re trying to make something interesting without wading into the crowded landscape of stuff that people already know they like.’
The ‘crowded landscape’ Micah speaks of is not strange or unfamiliar to anyone pursuing a career in music or the arts today. Like any Goliath-sized industry, it’s a machine, and we spoke at length about the increased value of creating distance between yourself and the inhospitable land of media and traditional popularity. ‘There’s a lot to say about the social media landscape and how it corrodes societal cohesion at large,’ Micah explains. ‘There are so many articles now about how Gen Z kids don’t ask each other on dates anymore, or they don’t dance at the club out of fear of being filmed. Those dynamics have existed since time immemorial. That feels far more destructive than our label telling us to post online.’
But youbet is not worried, and they’re not particularly interested in becoming cynical. Instead, they’ve built a mighty ecosystem around sincerity. They’re dancing, they’re going on dates. They work with children at School of Rock. I mean, come on. Their priorities are in order, and their energy is distributed accordingly. Youbet rejects the internet calculus that encourages instincts of profitability, visibility, and optimization. They care deeply about what they make, but they care just as much about the conditions under which the work is produced. In other words, the music is good because the foundation is great. And toward the end of the interview, scattered casually amongst other wise words and reflections, Micah said something that especially stuck with me: ‘How you spend your time is what your life is.’
And that is the real magic of a band like youbet. Micah accidentally created the perfect metaphor for how these two present themselves when she asked to wear her new bathrobe for our portraits. They make you feel at home in their sound because it’s rooted most fundamentally in love: for their sound, for their community, for their friendship. Micah describes Nick’s lyric-writing as ‘paint splatters… You step back and look at the whole picture, and it’s so beautiful.’ Nick describes Micah as the ‘magic sauce’ that brought his entire project together. And in the words of the firecracker Valerie Solanas – the woman, naturally, not the cat – ‘Love cannot flourish in a society based on money and meaningless work.’ Sans violence, go forth and love. Ask someone on a date and really, truly dance your heart out. And listen to youbet’s EP.