Photos by Sam Singh

“Whatever rules you might have about interviewing, you can forget about them,” Casablancas tells me as I plop down on the couch next to him. I fumble in my pocket for matches and the phone that will serve as recorder. For the first five minutes, the focus will be on one thing.

“So, this cake, is it chocolate?” Bercovici is looking closely at the red icing. “Cherry?”

Yaghmai suggests strawberry or vanilla. Beardo says it’s very light. Casablancas says we have four minutes left. I try and steer the conversation toward music, so we start talking about soccer.

“I guess Beardo and Jeff would play middle, me and Alex forward, and then Jake and Amir back,” says Casablancas. “And then maybe me and Jake can switch.”

“One time we were playing down in Chinatown or some shit, and I look over and see Jake, this full-ass mountain man, hit the fence like uhhh.”

“That was the last time I ever kicked a soccer ball,” Jake says between laughs. “It was a slippery astro-turf, and I was going hard because I'm a fucking team player. I knew I hit the first one, and I knew it looked hilarious. We didn't really know each other that well yet. Right? We were just getting to know each other?”

Casablancas looks up and smiles. “Jake only has one gear: champion mode. I'm always like ‘take it easy,’ and then we were playing and he just fucking slides in.” He pauses. “I'm more of a cherry picker, just positioning everything.”

Most of June for The Voidz was spent between residencies at Elsewhere and Boot & Saddle in Philadelphia. Despite a frontman with an immediately recognizable name, The Voidz are still a new band. A new band needs to get the word out, mess up on stage, and pay their dues in the all-too-familiar trench of a tour bus.

“We had magic moments and then un-magical moments,” Casablancas muses.

“There are a lot of technical things that have to be improved,” adds Beardo. “Chemistry, equipment, trying to make everything sound cooler. And then there's the whole performance of it all, which is just like doing your job as an instrument player or a singer. You're fighting two different sides: the technical equipment and the sound and your crew and then the actual nailing your parts. You can do that, but in this band is not that way. We care about every bit of it, you know? The way that the amp sounds, the way that the whole mic sounds or what mic is sounding...it’s a lot of work.”

“But you try not to show it, and try to make it seem fun,” Casablancas adds. “ It was fun, it just was not second nature because it was all a bunch of new shit. We just want it to feel different each show, with varying levels of success.”

The band was received with mixed reviews at their outset. Then with Casablancas’ name attached, it was dismissed as an indulgent noise rock solo project by some and hailed by others as a clean break from the large shadow cast by The Strokes. Their frenetic debut as a band, Tyranny, admittedly took a while to grow on me. A cacophonous storm of metal and rock and classical and jazz, it’s hard to grasp onto as a record. The Voidz live is an overwhelming assault on the senses, but one entirely grounded by how cohesively they tie these influences together. With the members themselves coming from so many different bands, this catch-all approach to rock—one that takes from African music, 80s Russian new wave, Turkish rap, and random YouTube finds, to name a few—is, above all, refreshing.

“Everything you see here, Julian curates,” Carapetis tells me. “He's the tastemaker for all of us, and brings all the best parts to the surface. The lyrics, the melody, the way we all come up with ideas. The magical moments, they’re not just from the ether. I felt that tonight. You get on stage and remember everything. It's that synergy we have, that confidence in each other.”

Casablancas is quick to chime in. “It's a natural thing that we do. We like versatile things so we talk about it and listen, but they also just play such different stuff! I'm always following them around with recording machines. One day I walked in [to practice], they're just playing ‘Pink Ocean’, and I'm like ‘the fuck is this? This is amazing!”

The Voidz’ sophomore effort Virtue is comparatively more streamlined while still keeping to the devil-may-care attitude toward music the band has fostered. The band continues to experiment with structure—bouncy guitar romp and lead single “Leave It In My Dreams” is immediately followed by “QYURRYUS,” a roiling explosion of horns, vocoder, and instrumental layering. All this said, there’s a noticeable absence of something as experimental as signature song “Human Sadness”, an 11-minute monster with roots in Mozart’s “Requiem Mass in D Minor” that served as the lead single for Tyranny.

“I'd been wanting to do like a ‘November Rain’ long-ass song for so long...it wasn't like that much of an ‘I have an inspiration’ moment.” Casablancas smirks. “It's unsexy, when you boil it all down.”

“It's the first time I've seen someone be so passionate about like, creative information,” Carapetis adds. “Capturing it, always chasing that thing. I've never seen that in anyone, that passion.”

The music everyone is listening to right now is as all over the place as what they’re making: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nils Frahm, “Mad As Hell” by U.S. Girls. “Sometimes, it's street musicians in other countries on Youtube,” says Casablancas. “Just glorious, sublime stuff.” I ask him if he ever saw street musicians playing tango in the streets of Buenos Aires.

“I didn't see any.”

“That's one thing you have to go back for.”