🎧 Approved: youbet

Brooklyn duo youbet make indie rock that keeps you slightly off-balance in the best possible way. Nick Llobet’s airy falsetto drifting through jangly guitar pop one moment, brutish fuzzy riffs the next, with twisted carousel atmospherics and bursts of studio noise somewhere in between. They flirt with shoegaze without fully committing to it, and the result is something genuinely hard to place and easy to love.

Llobet has been making music as youbet since 2020, when a song-a-week writing challenge and a chance encounter with Patti Smith at Penn Station kickstarted a long-stalled artistic rebirth. Two albums followed, but it’s the eponymous third, out now and sitting at 7.5 on Pitchfork, that feels like the real arrival. 

Bassist Micah Prussack came aboard properly for this one, having quit a law firm job in 2021 to focus on music full-time (“my parents told me, ‘Honey, this is a terrible idea’”, she’s said). The chemistry was immediate: early in their friendship they set themselves the task of learning 1000 songs together and that kind of deep mutual listening is audible throughout the record.

Co-produced with Katie Von Schleicher and Julian Fader, it was written on the road and draws on a wonderfully eclectic set of influences - the ‘Edward Scissorhands’ soundtrack, flamenco, Japanese noise-rockers Boris, Leonard Cohen - without sounding like any of them. 

Lyrically it traces the wreckage of an eleven year relationship and the slow, unglamorous business of rebuilding. “It’s like we’re running a family business”, Llobet says of the duo, which sounds like a joke until you hear how tightly they fit together.

They’re on the road now across North America through July.

🎧 Watch the video for ‘Worship’ below