Blair Doesn’t Sound Like Any Other New York Rock Band. That’s The Point

The members of the New York City-based band Blair could use a hand figuring out how to describe their music. The group’s sound moves intuitively through the expansive psychedelic slacker rock ethos of the Flaming Lips into pop-punk, hip-hop, and even electronic, all with alchemic cohesion. It’s the sound of your most eclectic but trusted friend taking control of the aux. “I’m waiting for people to call it something,” Paulie Ocampo Zapata, who plays guitar, drums, and bass in the band, says over Zoom. “You have to pick the genre on Bandcamp or on whatever, and it’s just like, I don’t know which one to pick. It’s really hard.”

The group’s latest album, Blair II, arrived last month and marks their first release since the 2021 EP Tears to Grow. The gap between releases is attributed to the standard growing pains for many bands in the 2020s: finding a new drummer and the Covid-19 pandemic both slowed them down. Nico Chiat, who handles guitar and production for the band, says it was also an opportunity for the group of longtime friends to grow as musicians. “The EPs that we’ve started putting out right when we started were just us learning how to make music together and record music,” he says. “The songs were us coming together and talking and writing in that moment. I feel like with this new record, there was no preconceived idea of what it would sound like, which was really exciting.”

Album opener “Propeller” has the slow-rolling feeling of an Alex G record before blooming into something wholly unexpected. A crunchy nu-metal guitar breakdown ushers in a bouncy verse from vocalist Genesis Evans, whose delivery skates somewhere between a straight rap verse and something you might hear in a Deftones song. On standout “Got2getoveru,” Evans finds a balance between pop-punk vocals and something more contemporary. “I just kind of did want to make a quick one, because I remember when we was jamming on that one, they came up with the guitar riff and I was just saying that ‘I got to get over you,’” Evans says. “I just wanted something kind of catchy. Even on some Playboi Carti shit or something.”

“We would start with just a part of a song, like a melody, and then share it with each other,” Chiat adds. “And there was no really knowing then what the song was going to sound like or when the song was going to be done, or what even made the song be done and be like, ‘OK, it’s finished now.’”

The result is something like lightning captured in a bottle, which is more or less Blair’s entire M.O. Even on the band’s earlier releases, they place a premium on capturing something authentic. The group first emerged around 2019 with a self-titled EP that caught fire locally, a perfect distillation of Midwest emo and the frenetic energy of New York, where all of the band’s members are from. Two years later, Tears to Grow landed in the middle of the pandemic like a signal from the future. At just three songs, the EP captured an emotional resonance that only crystalizes with time, a capsule of a moment of upheaval that the five boroughs were on the front lines for.

Now, with the addition of drummer Abbas Muhammad, the songs on their new record have a similar uncanny sense to them, as if coming from a shared memory. Like the “hybrid workplace” model of many offices in the post-pandemic world, the band says they made the record both collectively and independently. Even before Covid, they’d rotate between roles without much hierarchy, so over the past few years they’d meet up every few weeks and share what they were working on. “It was kind of like, just bring your microphone and interface, just having it wherever we were,” Chiat recalls. “Nothing was too planned, but we made sure that, if something came up, we were able to capture it.”

This is why the album sounds so all over the place, in the best way possible. Every member’s personality gets to stand on its own, finding a way to coexist next to the other. “We’re trying different things,” Chiat says. “I don’t think we ever really talk about genres, but maybe we talk about influences and we’re like, ‘Oh, I want these vocals to hit like the end of [Kanye West’s] ‘Runaway’” or something. We’ll say those types of things, but we’re never really talk about genre.”  

Ocampo Zapata adds: “When we put out the other stuff, what happened was just the putting of Blair into a box of ‘You guys are the rockers….you guys make sad songs, emo songs.’ Having that reputation was not necessarily the space that we wanted to always exist in.” Now, though, they feel unburdened: “All these songs have all of our personalities in it. We all filled all the little holes with little details and little things that are referenced in our own lives. The songs are just way more in line with how we actually are as people on our day-to-day.”