Laundry Day — a New York City-based indie-rock band — will perform at Sarner Underground on Jan. 18 at 8:30 p.m. The show will be the band’s second of the new year, following a New York Knicks halftime performance at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 8.
The band — composed of lead singer Jude Ciulla-Lipkin, vocalist and drummer Sawyer Nunes, guitarist Henry Weingartner and bassist Henry Pearl — formed during their freshman year at Manhattan’s Beacon High School after bonding “immediately” over music, according to Ciulla-Lipkin. Ciulla-Lipkin said the band’s origins were “serendipitous.” Soon after, the four started to record and release original songs on SoundCloud, quickly gaining online traction. By their senior year, Laundry Day was crafting their third album, “Homesick,” with Brockhampton’s producer Romil Hemnani.
Weingartner described this album as the band’s “turning point,” reminiscing on a trip to music producer Rick Rubin’s iconic recording studio, Shangri La, during their senior year.
“The ‘this is really happening’ moment was definitely when we finished school Friday, flew to Los Angeles Friday,” Weingartner said. “And we went to this legendary studio in Malibu, stayed until Monday, skipped school on Monday and went back to school on Tuesday.”
That same year, in 2019, Laundry Day performed at Camp Flog Gnaw — Tyler the Creator’s Los Angeles music festival — and Austin City Limits, an annual music festival in Austin, Texas. As Ciulla-Lipkin explained, the band learned “pretty fast that the industry is pretty small,” and at these two festivals, the boys encountered their music idols, including members of the band Brockhampton.
“None of us will ever forget being outside of the trailers [at Camp Flog Gnaw], and I looked around,” Ciulla-Lipkin said. “Henry was talking to these guys from Brockhampton. They treated us like peers and it was just such a dream.”
Despite their own sound leaning more toward rock, all four members of Laundry Day cite the R&B and rap fusion that is Brockhampton, and Hemnani in particular, as a key influence. Lead singer Ciulla-Lipkin described his band as “‘The 1975,’ but we listen to rap.” In other words: “pop-rock but with a New York hip hop influence,” Ciulla-Lipkin added.
“We grew up listening to rock music, whether we were in kiddie bands or our dads showing us rock music,” Ciulla-Lipkin said. “But when we were in High School, everyone was listening to rap. The marriage [between rock and rap] just happened very naturally.”
Pearl noted that each band member has their own music tastes. While he gravitates toward “super soft music,” they all share an appreciation for each other’s preferences, Pearl added. For example, he said they all love Sade — British-Nigerian soul singer.
“But we all love [all types of music],” Pearl said. “We make fun of people who are really pretentious and say, ‘as long as it’s done well.’ Honestly, as long as it has heart and is fun, we can get into it.”
Given Laundry Day’s roots in Hell’s Kitchen, it should be no surprise that the band draws inspiration from the quintessentially New York indie rock bands of the 2000s and 2010s, such as The Strokes. Squint your eyes at a photo of Laundry Day — replete with backward baseball caps and shorts that land below the knee — and you might just believe it’s still 2004.
Despite their early-aughts image, Laundry Day boasts more than 200,000 followers on TikTok where they often post satirical covers of songs. In one video with 10.8 million views, Ciulla-Lipkin and Nunes sing a distorted version of He is We’s “I Wouldn’t Mind.” The band’s unpretentious and unfiltered online presence feels like something from an earlier iteration of the internet, like Vine. In one YouTube video titled “Sandwich Break,” Pearl and Ciulla-Lipkin, fashioned in matching cargo jumpsuits, eat sandwiches in silence.
Pearl emphasized that the videos on the band’s TikTok aren’t premeditated but instead offer an honest reflection of their dynamic, not just as bandmates but also as friends.
“The bit that we do on TikTok, of harmonizing and just being silly about songs that we love, we have been doing that since probably before the band even officially started,” Pearl said. “That’s just really who we are. The band is our project and our art and our love and our friendship all coming together.”
The members describe themselves as friends first and bandmates second. This dynamic is so visible that TikTok users sometimes fail to realize they are a band, according to Ciulla-Lipkin. Although initially concerned that some may have not been taking them “seriously,” he added, “it doesn’t really matter.”
“Our audience was growing on social media, and then our audience grew on Spotify and on Apple Music and on Instagram, and more people were coming to shows, and we were getting more opportunities,” Weingartner said. “It all just collides if you’re doing it right. What was once a worry in the beginning is now the way that we do it.”
Notably, Drake discovered Laundry Day’s music through their TikTok, according to Ciulla-Lipkin. Weingartner joked that Drake was the “user test of the process of thinking our videos were funny and then finding our song.”
Ciulla-Lipkin reiterated that despite their lighthearted social media presence, music remains at the center of the group.
“We take the music so seriously, and we love music so much,” Ciulla-Lipkin said. “But we just have fun with it.”
Last year, Laundry Day toured their 2023 album, “Younger Than I Was Before,” across the United States and United Kingdom. A major highlight came in May when the band opened for Ed Sheeran at the Barclays Center, Ciulla-Lipkin said.
“It was just so surreal that we would even be in the same sentence as Ed Sheeran,” Ciulla-Lipkin said.
Laundry Day is “really excited for Dartmouth,” Ciulla-Lipkin shared, recalling how one of their first shows after the pandemic was at Wellesley College — a performance that left a lasting impression on the band. Doors open at 8:30 p.m.
