In their first musical iteration as The Naked Brothers Band, Nat & Alex Wolff had a knack for churning out endearing, kid-friendly homages to vintage rock and ‘60s bubblegum pop (“Banana Smoothie,” “I Don’t Wanna Go To School,” “If That’s Not Love”). Now as adults who have each carved out an acting career in addition to a musical one, they’ve continued to give older sounds a contemporary touch as a duo, skewing more recently towards the singer-songwriter alt-rock and lo-fi indie pop of the late-Aughts and early 2010s. Their inclination toward imitation made more sense when the two were kids on Nickelodeon and exploring their creative voices through the musicians they admired most. But as they’ve matured into young adults and refined their craft, they still can’t quite seem to shake off their derivative impulses.
This dissonance between the promise of their talent and the slightness of their execution informs their fourth and latest record, simply titled Nat & Alex Wolff. It’s a mostly pleasant and occasionally playful pastiche that often feels a little too familiar, echoing the work of Kurt Vile, Radiohead, and The National, though it certainly offers a lot more variety and personality than their last album, 2023’s dreary Table for Two. It’s also nice to hear the brothers attempt to flex their creative muscles again outside of their film performances, especially Alex, who’s made waves in both indie and commercial features over the past decade. Still, despite spending three years recording this project amid traveling and making movies, Nat & Alex Wolff lacks the emotional depth and lyrical finesse of the artists the brothers seem to be continuing to draw from, as if they’re still clinging onto the coattails of their inspirations without really having found a way to form a distinct identity of their own.
The most compelling tracks off Nat & Alex Wolff arrive early on, starting strong with the opener “Tough,” whose stammering piano loop hook and acoustic-driven production immediately make it one of the freshest, most commanding songs off the record. Even though its laid-back energy brings to mind the kind of indie rock you’d hear in 2018, “Tough” is perhaps the closest the two have come to finding a sound that best suits their abilities as artists. The lyrics don’t leave much of an impression—the album’s songwriting in general is unfortunately quite clunky and generic—but the brothers’ vocals align nicely with their wistful, catchy guitar playing. The dreamy, humid atmosphere of “This Round” and “If You Never Left Me” also provides a window into where Nat and Alex’s heads are at genre-wise. The presentation is uneven, especially with awkward lines like “You told me to be patient / It was a kick in the balls” that are delivered with straight-faced sincerity, but the sonic sleekness from each song suggests R&B-tinged bedroom pop could also be an appropriate vehicle for Nat and Alex were they to pivot in that direction.
For the most part, though, toying around with these different sounds gives the rest of the album an air of inconsistency. For every semi-inspired flourish—the vocal layering on the snappy “Jack,” the lovelorn “Emilia,” and the country-inflected closer “Rosalind”—there’s a song that’s either too conventional to resonate or too forced in its attempts at standing out. Regarding the former, pop superstar (and a good friend of the Wolffs’) Billie Eilish provides some lullabic backing vocals on “Soft Kissing Hour,” but the tune’s hushed, monotonous production struggles to simulate the romantic, intimate ambiance it’s aiming for, reading more sleepy than sensual. In the case of the latter, the bombastic “Horse” strains to mimic the breakbeats and dramatic piano riffs of Amnesiac-era Radiohead, but Nat’s vocals don’t quite have the same range as Thom Yorke, as he makes some tangible efforts to match singer’s stirring, guttural tenor.
His voice is much better served on the following track and album highlight “Candy Speak,” his tremulous falsetto backed against poignant piano chords, gentle drumming, and tender guitar riffs and strings. Again, the writing here is not super sharp or sophisticated (“You said he went home / And you only gave him head / Then I just saw red”), but the luxurious instrumentation makes you somehow almost forget the cringe, deepening Nat’s melancholic yearning for a former partner and bittersweet desire of wanting to respect her need for distance.
The brothers’ nostalgia for failed relationships, childhood memories, and the music of their upbringing seems to be the main running theme throughout Nat & Alex Wolff, and while those ideas can spark some powerful work, the album doesn’t quite take either in a particularly exciting or involving direction. That can be chalked up to a lack of a cohesive vision or a self-seriousness that mistakes navel-gazing for introspection, but mostly, it just feels like the two are more comfortable expressing their love for playing music rather than incorporating more emotional specificity in the music they’re playing. How can they move forward if they always seem to be looking back? In that regard, Nat and Alex naming their album after themselves is both ironic and apt, affirming their identity as artists preoccupied with the past while revealing their limitations as musicians.
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.
