In the vulnerable, personal-celebrity manifestations of their sophomore album Pirouette, the NYC band toils in ecstatic, anti-temporal gestures of their own four-person democracy. Read our feature on the avant-pop foursome and listen to their new single “Diva” below.
IN 2015, COLE HADEN SURVEYED Ruben Radlauer and Jack Wetmore while tucked away in his Crow’s Nest perch on the second floor of the Berklee cafeteria. Radlauer’s hair was dyed pink, Jack’s blond. “When you mark a pigeon in a race,” Haden tells me, “that was Ruben’s hair.” “You couldn’t miss us,” Wetmore agrees. Prior to their reunion in Boston, Radlauer and Wetmore knew each other while growing up in west Los Angeles, thanks to their fathers playing in a band together in the ‘80s. But how well they gelled as adults came as a shock. “[As kids], we would see each other around, but we didn’t click,” Radlauer adds. “One of the things that first actually connected us on a deep level was wanting to explore things in music that, as 19-year-olds, we hadn’t really seen before. Both of us came from a background of playing in rock bands, more or less, and we wanted to do something that had the same ingredients but a very different style of cheffing.”
“Cheffing, like cheffing?” Haden asks.
“You know… cooking?” Radlauer replies. “Doing some sort of chemistry?”
Haden’s gaze returns to my eye-level. “We make our own nachos, and we have enough nachos to share.”
But Wetmore and Radlauer were looking for something new at the inception of Model/Actriz. “I remember Ruben and I sitting in an apartment somewhere, watching Death Grips and Savages videos and being like, ‘Oh, man, we could do this shit, and we could do it better,’” Wetmore tells me. “We wanted to find new things that were more than just playing guitar and playing in a band.”
Haden grew up in the smallness of rural, conservative Delaware before migrating to Boston for school. Radlauer and Wetmore saw him putting on a “Laurie Anderson-type electronic opera,” DIY style: the 19-year-old, Grimes-obsessed, oceanside resort miscreant quaked across a basement stage wearing a corset soaked in fake blood. The first time he, Radlauer, and Wetmore hung out was during a show at Great Scott, where Austin, the original Model/Actriz bassist, got a concussion. “I forgot about that concussion,” Wetmore says. “One of many,” Haden remembers, chuckling. The transition into a four-piece was seamless: The band recorded demos and sent them to Haden, who returned quickly with fleshed-out, near-finished material. “The day after that,” Wetmore recalls, “we immediately went on tour.”
Radlauer says that he, Haden, and Wetmore “speed-ran the band thing,” designing a two-week summer tour of California where they played in Greater LA, Orange County, and “lots of warehouses, houses, and backyards” with only two songs finished: “Heavy Breather” and “Pimp.” Most of their shows were completely improvised. But even then, Haden, ever the mystic fulcrum of Model/Actriz, could sense a purpose and correctness settling in for him and the quartet. “I didn’t really know where we were going, but I knew it was special, what we were doing together.”
After releasing the EP No in April 2017, Model/Actriz would go on a two-year hiatus before returning pre-COVID with a new bassist, Aaron Shapiro, who Radlauer and Wetmore had known at Berklee. “What was your first impression of the band?” I ask him. “I had been living abroad the summer before I joined, and I remember listening to No by myself, walking around in Milan, and being like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what the fuck this is, but I really like this,’” he replies. Soon, Radlauer and Wetmore reached out to Shapiro to see if he wanted to “play some shows and do some shit.” Meeting Haden for the first time was a gratifying experience for him. “It felt really special to realize that this thing that felt so foreign to me actually had a lot of shared DNA,” Shapiro continues. “I remember being really shocked at how much we had in common. You build things up in your mind and then you are faced with them as you get older, and you’re like, ‘Oh, shit, there’s actually things I understand in this,’ but they seemed like such a different language before.”
“It seems like you’re speaking the language fluently,” I tell him.
“It turns out that the language was gibberish.”
MODEL/ACTRIZ’S DEBUT ALBUM, DOGSBODY, won a merriment of acclaim upon its arrival in February 2023. The throbbing songs followed Shapiro’s “everything is a drum” principle, as the climaxing, deadpan beats and hot jeremiads arrived like blood-letting rituals twisted into this brutal, ugly, body-counting tub of chic. When a band’s first effort gets good grades, the dialogues that follow are eyes-and-ears-coded, more often landing in the vein of, “Does the budget get bigger?” But what did Dogsbody afford Model/Actriz to abandon on its successor, Pirouette?
“I think we were worried, throughout the process of making [Dogsbody], what people would think,” Shapiro admits. “But when we finished it and we were looking at it in our hands, we were like, ‘Oh, actually, we don’t give a shit. We are proud of ourselves, and we’ve surprised ourselves.’ It’s a feeling that I think we can come back to and revisit as a reminder whenever we’re feeling that pull of expectation. The place that we can always come back to is each other.” Raudler piggybacks off his bandmate: “I think getting one thing critically acclaimed, in some ways, let me let go of that—of being like, ‘‘Hey, cool. We did it. We got the acclaim that I would have looked up to as a teen,’ and then just being like, ‘Okay, now that we’ve done that, let’s just make something that we want to make and not worry about it.’”
Dogsbody allowed Model/Actriz to move past aggressive music. That was a hard-style, noisy, and fucked-up-sounding record. “We definitely felt pressured to make it so, because all of our music up to that point had been really rooted in—and benefited from the legacy of—heavy music,” Radlauer argues. Ironically, the band’s heaviest song to date, “Ring Road,” is on Pirouette, but it exists as the result of a “fun experiment” rather than any obligation. But that was the reward of making this album, too—that the foursome could get to a harsh realm without having to template the entire record around it.
“It’s good to remember that you can make any style of music from any emotional place, that there’s no right way to make dance music,” Shapiro adds. “There’s dance music that’s good for cooking, there’s dance music that’s good for the club. There’s so many fucking hardcore bands that are making the heaviest, most massive music in the world as a joke, but that doesn’t make it any less massive. Therefore, it can apply all over the place. Dogsbody was an album that, making it, felt like what it feels like to listen to it—but that’s not the only way you can get to that point. Realizing that was really freeing.”
Photo by Josh Darr at Pitchfork Music Festival for Paste, July 2024
IN THE IDEA PHASE OF PIROUETTE, while they were briefly stationed in Vermont, the band had a conversation about Haden’s “yearning for something bright and more daytime-feeling” after they’d spent so much of Dogsbody in a subterranean place. A lot of the rhythmic tempo of LP2 came from the idea of “inherently dark music with a light peeking through that gives way to brightness,” Shapiro says. “It’s another continuation of this idea of exposure that is a throughline of Cole’s story—and then, Jack’s guitar playing opens up and gets brighter and truer to something that is positive.”
Before recording in Rhode Island, the band talked about making a gentle message even more so by juxtaposing it against angular textures. “It requires the four of us to have that push and pull of realizing that no one knows where the song is going to end up, but that we all want to get to the same place,” Shapiro notes. “I think, somewhere along that journey, is where all the contrast comes from, because we’re all taking different emotional and psychological journeys to get to the same place, and we just have to maintain trust that we do have this singular vision.”
Model/Actriz thrive off contrast, that much was immediately obvious upon Haden’s entry into the band. “He, in no way, belonged in a band,” Radlauer says. “He rescues us from being in a band, in a sense, or just being a post-punk band, by bringing this pop personality to it.” They leaned into that dynamic on Pirouette, allowing Haden’s vocal style to elevate each song to a dimension that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, even if it didn’t make sense for his style of writing to wash over aggressive, driving instrumentals. “This time, we spent a lot of time just focusing on leaving our comfort zone,” Wetmore concurs. “For years, it was easy to survive off of slamming really hard. If we didn’t know where something was supposed to go, we could just make it loud. And that was something that was honest, but this time, you could show the same emotion on the flip side of that coin by trying to just take it a little bit softer in any direction.”
Pirouette, like Shapiro says, is a dance album, and it’s far less claustrophobic than Dogsbody. Haden’s singing on “Audience” carouses through a build-up but never feels encroached upon by the noise contracting behind him. Such impressive spacial awareness is intentional, but the band doesn’t play coy about their shared chemistry. They are dauntless in their subtractions, allergic to addition. “Our style arises from our four distinct backgrounds blending,” Haden says. “The tension in our music benefits from four individuals coming together instead of all of us having the same background and then piling on to make a mixture of styles.” In that mixture of styles, the album’s choruses became softer than the verses. “I think we needed it,” Haden continues. “After the last album, it was like, ‘Where the fuck do we go? Harder? Are you kidding?’” When the band finished “Vespers,” the album’s intro track, Haden insisted he “heard the future.”
“It was a weird, confusing code break,” Wetmore elaborates.
“We were inhaling black molds,” Haden sneers.
Radlauer, Shapiro, and Wetmore are motivated by surprise. “If everything feels right the entire time that you’re creating something, you’re leaving a lot on the table, in terms of surprising yourself and letting things become more than their individual parts,” Shapiro argues. “Whereas, if things are just towing that line between feeling right and feeling uncomfortable, that’s how you get a lot of special moments.” The way the trio writes instrumentals is roundabout too, as they work together in anticipation of what Haden will bring to them, rather than having his vulnerability guide them towards risk. “We don’t usually hear the lyrics until after we’ve done all of our recording,” Wetmore says. “At the end of Dogsbody, going into writing Pirouette, I was like, ‘All right, well, I know this shit gonna be crazy, so we have to up it.’” Radlauer adds, “Had we not asked Cole to be in this band, Cole would never be in a band. Do you think that’s true, Cole?”
“Yes.”
“I think it really was fate.”
“I’m very lucky to be in this band,” Haden says, before trailing off. “But, I would have never chosen to be in a band.”
HADEN’S LYRICS COME FROM A poppy, diva-centric lens—a lens that, on paper, doesn’t benefit the vagueness of a band, as Radlauer explains it. “It feels like it’s written for the personal spotlight of a solo artist,” he adds. “That is something that we landed on for [Pirouette] in a different way, where it felt like there was real space in the instrumentation and openness for Cole to jump in and be that character, rather than be a cog in the machine.” The meaning of Pirouette became defined for Haden after he wrote “Doves,” a song that parallels his own coming-out experience. The themes of Dogsbody aren’t too dissimilar, but, on that record, he built walls to protect his inner-child. In the abrasiveness of those songs, the walls get dismantled, so Haden can “get to the point where I could speak gently to myself.” They’re battlecries for a gay youth no longer shadowed.
“When you’re speaking to a child who’s scared, lonely, not sure if the life that they’re going to live is going to bring back fulfillment and richness—because they don’t know how to accept that they’re different and that it’s okay to want something more than the life you’re living—I think I needed to go through that exorcism on Dogsbody to get to the point where I could really do myself the honor of speaking to myself from a place of love, which is what the process of this album was about,” he says. “It was happy tears that I was crying when I was writing, and I was making myself laugh. I was imagining myself being my own fairy godmother.”
Pirouette is not just a collision of Kylie Minogue stanning and rock and roll downpours—it’s an album for the middle-of-nowhere-born queer kids who worshipped and loved behind closed doors. Model/Actriz’s music tends to a younger self’s heart, as coming-of-age scriptures chasm amid the ocean-shaking, back-arching rapture of “Doves.” It’s affirming to hear Haden become the hero of his own story by being kind to the inevitability of retrospect. Heavy is the head that bears the memory, and Pirouette is diaristic and confrontational, even in dissonance—it’s, as Haden buzzes during “Cinderella,” “astonishing, utterly divine, exhilarating, preciously sublime.”
The spoken-word in “Headlights” represents a core tenet of Pirouette, as Haden recites a story about trust, crushing, family holiday parties, and reconciliation that spans nearly a decade. “I’d pray each night, asking God to make him see me in all the ways I couldn’t,” he murmurs, as the synths dribble towards a tape hiss. The song “vomited” out of him and into his notes app, and he only edited out what was superfluous to the story. Singing would have done the material a disservice, so Haden spoke it as plainly as possible, filling the atmosphere with as many details as he could without summoning a rhythm. “That felt like the crown jewel of traumas I inflicted on myself as a kid that I had never spoken out loud, and there were a lot of moments on this record that were private pains that I didn’t want to carry anymore.”
By speaking that hurt into the ether, Haden was freed from his scars of loneliness—lived-in, unforgettable vignettes of dancing alone in his room but imagining himself on a distant stage. To keep the score of “Headlights,” he recalls a couplet in “Cinderella: “When I was five, I remember clearly my want to have a Cinderella birthday party.” “Even my mother didn’t know how painful that was for me until we spoke about it recently. But that pain over many years—that story sums up probably five years of pain, of waiting to see this person only once a year, if at all. I was ashamed and I would trivialize it as not as meaningful as it actually was to me. Writing [‘Headlights’, it felt like it needed to be said a long time ago. It finally came out of me.”
Photo by Kane Ocean
“Departures” begins with Haden having his very own Gaga moment, purring, “Be embodied” and evoking Jesus and the Patron Saint of Delaware. He says, “It’s a song about giving yourself permission to be bold and step onto your platform through the example of others and through the people that you find strength in, and wondering about when someone else is needing that, am I the person that they embody?” “Cinderella” and “Doves” make for quite sensual-sounding music, but not theatrically so. Haden was a virgin until Model/Actriz released No, decorating himself, almost cartoonishly, in the gay tropes his pop foremothers had wielded before him. While queer liberation is frequently rooted in debauchery and pleasure, sex’s loudness in LGBTQIA+ culture is a heightened response to bodies being policed.
Despite Model/Actriz’s practices, hedonism is not always a pathway to joy. “There’s a lot of emptiness that you feel just as often, as a queer person seeking refuge in sex,” Haden says. “I don’t know if I really am being precious about how it’s perceived, other than making sure that what I say I feel connected to, that it’s my truth. It’s complicated. Sex is different in this world.” The point of Pirouette, for Haden, was that the new songs “lift at the front of their face” and aren’t victim to complicated, misguided interpretation. “I wanted them to be well-written,” he continues, “but it’s not about how obtuse and vague they are.” The poetry of Dogsbody had clear meaning, but Haden restrained from speaking undoubtedly by cloaking lyrics in metaphor. “This time, I want the Genius page of these songs to have no annotations. I wanted them to be so clear that there was no misunderstanding. After Dogsbody, people still didn’t believe that I was gay. I would see that and be like, ‘Okay… a fag is in charge.’”
FAST-FORWARD TO SUNDAY, JULY 21st, 2024. Model/Actriz are playing a set on the Red Stage at Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. Their music is a palette cleanser, cast between the folky idiosyncrasy of Joanna Sternberg and the old-hued pop textures of Jessica Pratt. A mustachioed Haden begins the set by applying lipstick and clutching a purse in vogue before the crowd. Like a tremor, he and his bandmates rollick and squirm through No throwbacks (“Liar,” “Matador”) and crumble and reanimate across Dogsbody diatribes (“Donkey Show,” “Crossing Guard,” “Slate”). It’s poetry charred by a Midwestern sun; you can taste divinity in the intensity, as hundreds of people convert into fans in real time at the same time.
Model/Actriz are great live, and notoriously so. If you live in New York City—or, perhaps, know somebody who does—then that is likely more fact than opinion. In 2023 alone, they played 100+ gigs, including my introduction to them—a 30-minute set at a gay bar in Austin, Texas over South by Southwest week. (They were the only band I was told by multiple friends to go see.) Sometimes, a Model/Actriz show straddles a fine line between serving cunt and crashing into a bridge embankment head-on. Oftentimes, a Model/Actriz show is impossibly both—and it’s masochistically fabulous, like applying makeup right before a crash-out. Together, the band enters a place during a show that cannot be entered during a recording. “It’s a soundtrack to whatever you’re doing at that moment, and it meets you in whatever mood you are in,” Haden says. “But at a show, we have complete control to orchestrate something larger than someone’s individual experience listening would be.” A performance is how he gets close to the person he wants to be all the time: “I feel connected to my own body. I feel very present with the energy in the room, and then. individually. with everyone there.”
Radlauer loves the individualism (“the four of us as individuals, as well as our respective individualism”) of creating in the studio. “It feels like it’s striving to carve out something that is our own, and it’s very personal to us,” he argues. “The shows feel the closest you can get to being part of the collective consciousness. It feels like one organism, the longing for the hive-mind, or part of the colony of ants.”
“I was just going to say Antz, the movie,” Haden interjects.
“The body longs for communism, being one unit that’s moving together,” Radlauer co-signs. “Sometimes, if I start feeling weird while I’m doing an interchange in the subway in Union Square at rush hour, it feels like an ant in a colony, just moving as one with everyone. But [performing music] is the positive version of that.”
“It’s a communal experience similar to communism,” Haden adds, “and it has the cult of personality like communism, too.”
The cult of Model/Actriz becomes Shakespearean on stage, as Haden turns into a ketamine-dosed Ian Curtis playing Lady Macbeth. His “tear you apart” proverb never falls out of phase, and the band’s music expands under venue light. “Mosquito” and “Pure Mode” punish and cleave through the fingers and taut singing of metro urchins. But telling a story on stage is not a conscious or even improvisational decision made by Model/Actriz. Whatever otherworldly or out-of-body anecdote sprouts from that context is more so a separation of play and work. “There’s a lot of different ingredients and emotions that go into everything, leading up to the show,” Shapiro says. “But then, the actual show experience is really gratifying, because it’s so simple and pure. Everything all at once, in a deep way, feels really good.”
Photo by Josh Darr at Pitchfork Music Festival for Paste, July 2024
MODEL/ACTRIZ HAVE BEEN A POP BAND since the very beginning, even throughout the blustering masquerade of No eight years ago. For almost 10 years, they’ve been categorized as post-punk, noise-rock, or dance-punk. It’s a genre I gravitated towards first after coming out in college, especially that first Suicide album, a document as monotone and droning as the strident tangents that paint the corners on Dogsbody and Pirouette. But, on a Berklee campus baked in traditionalism, the foursome were contrarians from the outset, disinterested in rigidity and attacking the genre’s stiffness with spectacle.
“We have a streak of defiance, we like music that is enigmatic,” Haden explains. “Nihilism, to me, feels impotent and pointless. We all love life and living. It’s about celebration, and I think we make it obvious that our shows are a party and our music is meant to shine a light and celebrate every aspect of the human condition with equal vivacity and importance.” When the heady, gothic eviscerations of Dogsbody landed two years ago—and as the band pulled from patterns first arranged by the no wave mutilations of Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks—Haden’s disturbing vocals, Shapiro’s vibrating bass, Radlauer’s disco beats, and Wetmore’s formless riffs painted scenes, not songs. Model/Actriz were hypnotic, even when they whispered. Dogsbody was twink death by a thousand cuts.
On Pirouette, Model/Actriz dirty Dogsbody’s tabula rasa. It’s a tapestry of indulgence, as bravado turns into vulnerability and shame is silenced by a command of self. The metallic, clanging “Poppy” features the foursome’s first-ever harmony, and the folky “Acid Rain” and the breathy, slinky “Baton” both fall into similar form. Sure, “Cinderella” is not a song as conventionally attractive as your mainstream-hit-next-door, but Model/Actriz approach the benchmark of captivating music through attitude and charisma rather than structure. “I think pop music is attitude,” Haden says. “It’s about the person who wrote the song and is singing the song, and doing so in a way where their presence almost eclipses the song itself—that, when you hear the song sung by someone else, you always have their face in your head when you’re listening to it. So I think, in that way, if you can rise to that occasion to be a personality that’s large enough, then you are a pop star. Scott Walker is a pop star.”
Radlauer had his “aha moment” with pop music after hearing Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now for the first time, when, after listening to the record casually, he returned to the music and paid attention to the beat. I was like, ‘This is so fucking disharmonic and weird, you don’t even notice how insane the beat is because the hook’s a hook,’” he says. “Or ‘Single Ladies’: That beat is so weird and not pop, but the identity in the vocals and the hook are undeniable. The personality defines the pop.” There are techno and house influences on Pirouette, but one of the band’s biggest reference points this time around was Janet Jackson, whose Control and Velvet Rope albums have influenced everyone from Amaarae to black midi. But don’t expect to hear a “Nasty” dupe of any kind, as Model/Actriz look to the nooks and crannies of Jackson’s music for whims, as if they’re noticing something that an untrained ear might miss. As a result, Pirouette sounds like the mechanical parts of pop songs getting blown-out, as if the music Model/Atriz make is a deconstruction of the music they’re listening to.
The band admit that they are grade A, pro-rabbit hole music dorks. In fact, they thrive on curation, with Shapiro contending, “I think that feeling of listening to something and then finding something in that that communicates something you want to communicate within this project is so special.” “Then, finding a way to investigate that and dive in as a group—it’s a huge part of the DNA of the band at this point,” he continues. “You know exactly what it is about the song that is unbelievable to you, and it’s almost an impossible task to communicate that to everyone else. But, in the process of doing that, you learn a lot about something you get lost in.”
In the vulnerable, personal-celebrity manifestations of Pirouette, Model/Actriz toil in ecstatic, anti-temporal gestures of their own four-person democracy. The album is its own pageant. “Are you free to be a bitch, but graciously?” Haden asks at the dawn of the album, before labeling himself a “small-business owner living in America while trapped in the body of an operatic diva.” These 11 songs are not the Greek tragedy-inspired heirlooms threading Dogsbody together. Instead Haden, veiled by the machinery of his bandmates like a millennial Fad Gadget and absolutely soaked, “dripping head to toe in Prada Sport,” spawns into view like Christ in fishnets.
When the time comes to make LP3, Model/Actriz hope that, if they aren’t able to replicate Young Thug’s Jeffrey dress on the cover, they can have their own Sephora-exclusive perfume. But don’t expect it to look like the gold bust of Eilish or the chocolate bar shape of Sabrina Carpenter’s Sweet Tooth bottle. It’ll be shaped like a cock, namely the ceramic appendage adorning the center of Dogsbody’s image. “We all have a singular vision where you press on the balls and the fragrance comes up the urethra,” Haden says. “It’s actually like a Listerine spray.”
Pirouette is out May 2 via True Panther Records. Listen to “Diva” below.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
