One morning in late spring, I met up with Les and Brady in New York, where they had just arrived after spending the night on their bus en route from Philadelphia, the previous stop on their tour. They were in town to play two sold-out shows at Bushwick’s thirty-four-hundred-person-capacity Avant Gardner Great Hall venue. This was a leap for the pair, whose first show, in 2018, was performed on the Internet as part of a Minecraft festival.
Les and Brady were in the downtown Manhattan offices of Interview magazine, where they were preparing to do a photo shoot. A stylist had dressed them in exaggeratedly proportioned, deceptively streamlined black garments from the Balenciaga designer Demna. (Brady’s JNCO-style pants actually had a skirt option attached to the back.) Punctuated by comically large thermoplastic polyurethane clogs, which Brady said he had a pair of at home, the looks made the duo, with their scraggly Duff McKagan hair, look like woodland-creatures-gone-dirtbag goth. (Underneath the hoodie she was given, Les was wearing her own vintage Budweiser T-shirt.)
“I really like this outfit,” Les said, plucking at her baggy shorts. “It’s probably like ten thousand dollars. Too bad I’m trying to buy a house.”
“Do you think it’d be hard to steal?” Brady asked, neutrally.
“We’re about to see how hard it is,” Les said, equally deadpan. She wondered if she might try parkouring off the side of the building with the borrowed clothes on her back.
In person, the duo’s affect is lovable, if wry. Les, who is twenty-eight, is the voluble one of the pair, and is given to occasional comic riffing (quoting Eric André on music school: “You can handcuff a chimpanzee to a saxophone and it’ll graduate with straight A’s.”) Brady, who is twenty-nine, has a more relaxed stoner’s energy and an affection for cryptic pronouncements. (When I asked him why the band chooses to wear wizard-style capes onstage, he paused to think, and then responded: “Magic-type vibes.”) Both grew up in suburban St. Louis where, in the early two-thousand-and-tens, they met at a house party and hit it off thanks to their shared desire to make music. “We were, like, ‘Let’s make a producer-type band together,’ ” Les recalled. That plan came to fruition a couple of years later, after Les had moved to Chicago to pursue a degree in acoustics at Columbia College, and Brady visited. He had become involved in the burgeoning SoundCloud-rap scene, decamped from St. Louis, where he’d been studying music engineering, to Los Angeles, “to sleep on this dude’s couch and produce.” They began sending each other demos that they were excited about, and eventually collaborated on tracks long-distance, sharing Logic Pro files, and tweaking and adding to each other’s offerings in what Les calls an “iterative” process.
Both had an affinity for the experimental compositions of the avant-garde New York polymath John Zorn, and the layered, abstract work of the electronic musician Daniel Lopatin (known by the name Oneohtrix Point Never). But their love of difficult soundscapes was matched by their appetite for commercial hits. Though they didn’t know each other at the time, the first show that they both attended, in seventh grade, was on the 2004 reunion tour of Van Halen, whose music is as much sexy, melodic pop as it is metal. (Brady: “I wasn’t yet privy to how good Eddie was at that time.” Les: “Oh, I was privy as fuck.”) Growing up, Brady liked pop-punk savants Blink-182 and the ska-punk Long Beach chillers Sublime. (While he was changing clothes during the photo shoot, he showed me a tattoo on his bicep of the Sublime logo.) Les had the rappers Eminem and Nelly on her iPod Shuffle and tried to mimic and modify Black Sabbath riffs when she learned to play guitar in middle school. “I was always a pretentious little shit,” she told me. “But you can’t deny when something is just super-duper catchy and sounds really fucking good and makes people happy.” In high school, she’d imagine how great it would be to write like Max Martin, the Swedish mega-producer, who has worked with Britney Spears and Taylor Swift.
The move from the alternative margins to the mainstream has been a paradigmatic model in the world of popular music, at least since the rise of Nirvana in the early nineteen-nineties, and one way to think about 100 gecs’s ascent is along these now familiar lines: Les and Brady, two unknown kids from the middle of the country noodling on their computers, in their respective teen bedrooms, reaching unforeseen commercial success, give or take a decade later, through talent, hard work, and, crucially, corporate support. In “Hollywood Baby,” the third single from their new album, the pair seem to refer to their newfound fame and its potential pitfalls. “I’m going crazy / Little tiny Hollywood baby / Brand new Mercedes / I’ve been at the crib going crazy,” Brady sings, before reaching the bridge, with its explosive refrain—“You’ll never make it in Hollywood, baby!”—which Les repeats, her voice taking on an increasingly aggressive edge.