WHITNEY - SPARK Price: €27.99 Format: LP Availability: Immediate Dispatch

Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek could hear the staggering differences in the songs they
were writing for their third album as Whitney, SPARK—the buoyant drum loops, the effortless
falsetto hooks, the coruscant keyboard lines. They suddenly sounded like a band reimagined,
their once-ramshackle folk-pop now brimming with unprecedented gusto and sheen. But
could they see it, too?
So in the ad hoc studio the Chicago duo built in the living room of their rented Portland
bungalow, a shared 2020 escape hatch amid breakups and lockdowns, Julien and Max decided
to find out. Somewhere between midnight and dawn every night, their brains refracted by
the late hour and light psychedelics, they'd play their latest creations while a hardware store
disco ball spun overhead and slowed-down music videos from megastars spooled silently on
YouTube. Did their own pop songs—so much more immediate and modern than their hazy
origins—fit such big-budget reels? “We'd come to the conclusion we weren't going to be filming
Super 8 videos to this stuff anymore,” Julien remembers with a grin. “How about something
more hi-fi, cinematic?” When the footage and the tunes linked, Julien and Max knew they had
done it, that they'd finally found Whitney's sound.
SPARK reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, its dozen imaginative
and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant
electronics. What's more, Whitney reduces three years of extreme emotional highs and lows
into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks a singable lesson in what it is they
(and, really, we) have all survived. The recalcitrant ennui of opener “NOTHING REMAINS,” the
devastating loss of “TERMINAL,” the sun-streaked renewal of “REAL LOVE”: However surprising
it may sound, SPARK is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an honest accounting of how
it feels when you move out of your past and into your present, when you take the next steps of
your lives and careers at once and without apology. SPARK maintains the warmth and ease of
Whitney's early work; these songs glow with the newness of now.
Listen closely, and you'll notice frequent references to smoke and fire throughout SPARK,
itself a double entendre for inspiring something new or burning down the old. Max and Julien
were indeed in Portland for the Fall of 2020, when smoke from nearby fires choked the city at
record levels. It was terrifying and tragic, but they pressed on. “We found a way to live while the
world was burning/Real life was caving in,” Julien sings almost merrily during “BACK THEN,” an
anthem for finding out what's on the other side of hardship.
In these dire days, scientists speak increasingly of serotiny, an evolutionary miracle that
causes some trees to release seeds only amid a season of fire. That is how SPARK often feels—
Whitney's circumstances were so fraught on so many levels that they hung “the past…out to
dry” and began again, finding a fresh version of themselves, their relationship, and their band
after the blaze. Max and Julien are back in Chicago now, sharing a cozy walkup with a little
studio, where they're already building songs for the next Whitney album. They're both in happy
romances, too. Now that they let the past burn, everything is new for Max and Julien. SPARK
is not only Whitney's best album; it is an inspiring testament to perseverance and renewal, to
best friends trusting each another enough to carry one another to the other side of this season
of woe


1) NOTHING REMAINS
2) BACK THEN
3) BLUE
4) TWIRL
5) REAL LOVE
6) MEMORY
SIDE A: SIDE B:
7) SELF
8) NEVER CROSSED MY MIND
9) TERMINAL
10) HEART WILL BEAT
11) LOST CONTROL
12) COUNTY LINES