Nat and Alex Wolff Are All Grown Up
We sat down with the boys behind the Naked Brothers Band to talk about Table for Two, their evolution from Nickelodeon to a more mature sound and how they’ve remained so bright-eyed through it all
Photos courtesy of the artist
Nat and Alex Wolff enter a conference call with me and immediately start talking directly over each other. “When our publicists call on different ends, it’s like two divorced parents and we have our lawyers on [the phone,]” Alex jokes. “Direct all calls to my lawyer,” Nat replies, and the two begin ribbing each other over who will get the house. I make a mental note: jokes are not only allowed, but encouraged, in this professional setting. It’s 10 in the morning and I, admittedly, have barely gathered the wherewithal to brush my teeth. Alex, on the other hand, is wandering the streets of Fort Greene on a brief break (if one can call an interview a break) from shooting his newest project. Street noise blares nearby as he describes what’s going on around him in a cheekily nonchalant manner reminiscent of the children’s book Nothing Ever Happens On My Block, in which the tot-sized protagonist yawningly allows fires and thievery and parachuters to drift around him as he laments his neighborhood’s lack of stimuli.
Alex is, perhaps, more aware of his surroundings. He starts in on a sort of vigilante-justice bit about fighting crime amidst those ever-dangerous Brooklyn brownstones when he’s stopped in his tracks. “There is a massive funeral going on right now in front of me,” he explains in apparent shock. “There’s like a hundred people and they’re all just mourning someone.” Nat’s glee at his brother’s situation is unmissable. “Alex, where are you?” he almost yelps into the phone, and it becomes clear to me that the optimal interview here is really between the two of them.
It’s been 12 years since Black Sheep, the brothers’ last full-length LP not under the Naked Brothers Band moniker they made famous nearly 20 years ago, and almost seven since their EP Public Places. In the meantime, the Wolffs have grown up. Nat made my mother weep openly next to me in The Fault in Our Stars and now stars opposite Christoph Waltz in Prime Video’s The Consultant; Alex scared everyone shitless in Hereditary and got us squeamishly uncomfortable in M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. The boys’ music career actually began on-screen, of course, with The Naked Brothers Band, for which they are eternally cemented in many a nostalgic twenty-something’s heart. Luckily, the two seem to have escaped the growing-pain controversies we’ve grown to expect in the interim period between child star and Real Serious Hollywood Grown Up, instead opting to quit the show for their education and dive in and out of the industry as it suited them.
It shows on Table for Two, the brothers’ new LP. The album is unrushed, initially meant to come out in 2021, but Alex and Nat chose to push it back while focusing on their ever-more-complex medley of side hustles and big-name gigs. It’s coming out on their mother Polly’s birthday, a belated thank-you to The Naked Brothers Band’s O.G. showrunner. There’s some sibling bickering about the intentionality behind the date, but I’ve decided to run with it for sweetness’s sake. “When you’re younger, you’re very, very narrowly focused on, I don’t know, the girl you’re in love with, or whatever. And I think that’s definitely still on the album. But I think more than ever, our deep roots of our family and our parents and where we grew up, and maybe some more all-encompassing things that haven’t been addressed before are more addressed on this album,” Nat explains. (And here, I’ll admit that I was warned in advance that the two might be difficult to tell apart on the phone, and I realized too late how true that was. There is some sonic guesswork going on in these quote attributions.) There’s more depth, less facade, no myopia or quotidian teen strife on Table for Two; it was built to show off the bases of the brothers’ identities, a long-simmering work concocted to evoke their very ethos.
The family band is a unique specimen in the music world, and a paradoxical one: It’s rare to find a window so clear into the building blocks of someone’s personality incorporated naturally into their music. There’s also a potential for pretension in the whole ordeal, an “it’s in our DNA” bravado that’s easy to wrinkle your nose at. But not with Nat and Alex; if they have one thing going for them, it’s that they really do seem to love working together. They’re also quite well media-trained, having been at it since the ages of eight and 11, but if their brotherly adoration is a fiction, it’s one I’m happy to fall for. The comparative maturity of the album’s content is delightfully offset by the boyishness of their interpersonal antics, the phone-line giggles and jokes I’m determined to get in on. They make a club you want to join, even if it’s played up to the nth degree when they’re being recorded.
That fraternal anchoring has also allowed the Wolffs to create an internally focused album that feels simultaneously sincere and collaborative, no small feat. During COVID, the two hunkered down in a five-person pod and wrote most of the album without much outside interaction—eating, sleeping, and socializing in a world whose fixture was their music and each other. “It felt like a recentering in certain ways and us connecting as friends and brothers,” Nat explains. “And lovers,” Alex interjects. The two are marvelously aware of their fan forums, and seem to thrive off improvising little pieces of salacious nonsense when the mood gets too serious.