Taste Test
What is “good taste” anyway? Allow your favorite actor, musician, celebrity, or comedian to let you in on what they’re watching, reading, and consuming.
New York is a city of mythological proportions, a global capital where dreams are made or squashed. And yet, New York is also a place where millions of regular people live without anything of note happening to them. It is this juxtaposition between hype and anonymity, bombast and ordinariness that the duo of Gretchen Lawrence and Coumba Samba mine for inspiration as the band New York. Born and bred pop-music fans who just moved to the city after several years in London, they deflate expectations: Their music is low-budget and low-energy — anhedonic sleepover-rap meets underground electropop, like Coco & Clair Clair but even more minimal. “The main emphasis of a lot of young music is to get really lit and overstimulated, and we don’t necessarily relate to that,” Lawrence says.
New York’s music is taking off: Samba walked the Paris Fashion Week runway for August Barron, then DJ’d the after-party with Lawrence. In a few weeks, they are going on a global tour with the Norwegian duo Smerz. They caught up with The Cut ahead of their performance at the Unsound Festival in Krakow, Poland, for a conversation about their partnership, creative inspirations, and the road ahead.
What is your relationship to New York, the city?
Coumba Samba: I grew up here, so it’s home for me.
Gretchen Lawrence: I’ve always been obsessed with it. Being from Eastern Europe, you dream of America. We were living in London for a while, and then Coumba moved back and we’re at a place with New York, the band, for me to get an artist visa. So I finally made my dream come true.
As a city, it really works for me. I think it’s the perfect size, and it’s more lightweight compared to London, where it feels you only commute for work and you work with everyone you know. In New York, people take more time for themselves. But I’m so new, I haven’t found my scene.
What’s your origin story as a duo? How did you meet and decide to make music together?
Samba: During the pandemic, I basically moved into a place where Greta and one other friend were living, and we just clicked over music.
Lawrence: We were living in a massive ’30s council estate, which was a crazy scene. There were always people with burner phones and breeding dogs and kids climbing up scaffolding. A lot of the council estates have open balconies, so you’re just chilling on the balcony having a coffee and then just looking down at what people are doing.
We have different perspectives on similar music, but both of us were heavily on Tumblr. We began to realize that we would be perfect creative collaborators because we don’t have to overexplain things. We made one track and showed it to a friend and she was like, What the fuck is that? That’s crazy. And then we made some more demos that were super weird and experimental, kind of inspired by the Space Lady.
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What were these shared musical reference points that you had?
Samba: Electro, footwork, and pop music.
Lawrence: Maybe DJ Rashad, DJ Assault, M.I.A., Felix da Housecat, and a lot of Ariana Grande. I have this one memory of me putting on “Knock You Down,” by Keri Hilson and Ne-Yo. Coumba was clapping, like, How do you know this song?
Pop music is often about creating an atmosphere for the vocal. The beat doesn’t play as big of a role, even though it’s so important, as like in the 2000s when club music became pop — like Chemical Brothers or that kind of stuff.
There is a cohort of younger pop artists who are merging pop top-line melodies with drum ’n’ bass or U.K. garage or other underground club music. Are there artists that you think of as peers or inspirations?
Lawrence: Calvin Harris. I was just now thinking about Calvin Harris’s “Bounce” with Kelis. It’s such a tune. Then, obviously, “One Kiss” with Dua Lipa. That was playing everywhere when that came out.
Growing up on Tumblr, what were your obsessions?
Samba: I went through a lot of phases, but I don’t think any of it was cool. It would be cuts from Skins, gold chains, and Arctic Monkeys T-shirts.
Lawrence: I think my peak Tumblr phase was probably Boy London and more goth stuff. Nike Air Max, leggings, oversize tees, gold chains, beanies, army jackets — what was happening in London at the time paired with Azealia Banks’s Fantasea mixtape.
Your visual style is very low-budget, experimental, iPhone-ish photography. Are there any directors who have inspired you?
Samba: I don’t know. I mean, we’re both just creative.
Lawrence: Both of us work across a lot of different mediums and we know how to do everything ourselves: graphic design, video editing, all of it. We are anti–being overproduced.
What are three things you’re interested in right now?
Lawrence: I’m reading a book called Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. He kind of invented cyberpunk literature. That book is amazing. It’s about this fashion consultant who has an allergy toward bad branding and logos. In the night, she’s super deep in these weird video forums. And Purity & Danger, which is the most interesting podcast, is history, culture, weird kind of — I don’t know, they have episodes on human dolls to birthday cakes. And then Paris. That was inspiring for our latest EP.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
