Voyeur appear in our Summer 2024 Issue with cover stars Wallows, Drain, Maya Hawke, the Linda Lindas, and Winnetka Bowling League. Head to the AP Shop to grab a copy.
When Voyeur booked nine SXSW shows in five days, they’d barely been a band for a year. “Before we went down there, I don’t think we’d played nine shows in total,” says Jake Lazovick, the songwriting catalyst of the hard-hitting quartet. “Within those five days, we doubled the amount that we’d even been on a stage together playing songs.”
Not for lack of interest. The independently operating band celebrated the release of their debut EP, Ugly, to an entirely packed-out club just a month before. In five tracks, Voyeur manage a cantankerous, moody, multifaceted record barbed with Velvety hooks. Imagine Jonathan Richman fronting an ’80s SST group, through the lens of a rock historian obsessed with the gunk of rock ’n’ roll.
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“I saw a discussion asking, ‘What are the bands that are ripping off Nirvana?’” Lazovick says. “People named like four bands. I thought, ‘There can’t be four bands ripping off Nirvana right now. I wish there were 25. I need more. We need more bands.’”
Sure, this band are young, but the accelerated development illustrates a group worth more than the sum of their parts. Lazovick joins singer-guitarist Sharleen Chidiac, drummer Max Freedberg, and bassist Isaac Eiger — all of whom are known for endeavors previous to Voyeur. Lazovick ended his popular avant-pop project Sitcom shortly before forming Voyeur, and spends a healthy amount of time producing music videos. Freedberg is one of the most in-demand drummers in New York. Eiger, a record producer and audio engineer, recently bid farewell to his beloved Strange Ranger project. Chidiac, an accomplished choreographer — directing, for example, fashion shows across the globe — operates the dance studio Pageant.
“The first half of this band, I was just like dancing onstage,” she says, in her and Lazovick’s bergamot-incensed Queens apartment. Her early dance moves bridged high-modern deliberation with a sense of art scene freakout. Now, she commands a towering presence. When Lazovick started writing songs that he believed needed a second voice, she picked up the guitar and stepped to the mic. She stands center stage, and recent press identifies her as “lead singer,” something that amuses them.
“I don’t feel like that is true,” she says. “It doesn’t align with me, but I kind of am OK, with also time, having to correct what the dynamic really is.” That organic development reflects the concise spiritual navigation of the group. “The songs that really felt good in Texas are what brought us to deciding the next EP,” Chidiac says, also swearing the songs verge from the pure abrasion of their first releases into something “moodier.”
“I had so much anger when I started the band,” Lazovick says. “I wanted to scream all the time. I was really upset at the state of the world, at the way the world operates. I just wanted everything to be power chords that rage. Like, in your face, screaming the entire time. We played a couple of shows where all the songs were like that. Then I got the anger out, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m good.’”
In early June, the band recorded that follow-up record, at the legendary BC Studio in Gowanus, headed by Martin Bisi — whose credits include the bulk of early Sonic Youth, a handful of Swans records, and a smattering of other noise-rock staples. “It feels like you’re not in New York,” Lazovick says of the cavernous concrete-and-plaster studio. “Or you’re in New York, but it’s a different era of New York.” The grimy space sockets directly onto the pummeling, ultra-live sound they’re searching for.
Blissfully unaware of the purported “rock revival” in New York City, Voyeur operate in a zone of their own, interested most in work ethic. “I just constantly, constantly write,” Lazovick says. “So the songs keep coming.”
Meanwhile, Freedberg maintains a practice schedule that would have most people reconsidering their life choices. Working nights and evenings at a downtown restaurant, he makes his way to his practice space once he gets off. He then plays drums incessantly from around midnight to 6 a.m.
“I miss the sun mostly,” Freedberg jokes. But he never misses the beat — this practice has molded him into a drummer both intensely stylish and viscerally powerful. With crash cymbals towering above his head, he manages musicality, taste, and power into concrete beats and bold fills that never overplay their hand. At a recent wall-to-wall show at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right, Freedberg lugged a set of bongos onstage that he played for approximately one riff, a reflection of the deliberation and purpose the band invoke.
When the other members occasionally make it to Freedberg’s late-night practices, they culminate in mantic, trance-inducing marathons.
“We’ve been doing this thing at practice where we’ll just play the main riff of the songs and play it for 20 minutes with the metronome on,” Lazovick says. “It’s interesting what happens when you get really tight in your body, with the song, where it’s just that muscle memory or the finger strength or little nuances of your wrists.”
Last week, Voyeur released a new single, “Give It To You,” a less abrasive cut that nevertheless maintains the grimy ethos for which Voyeur have become known. On July 2, Voyeur will screen a full-length movie called Street Scene they’ve been working on for months, an hour-long neo-noir made with hand-held camcorders, in the spirit of David Lynch’s Inland Empire, Chidiac’s favorite film. Bridging the choreographic practice of Chidiac with the video art of Lazovick, the piece interrogates the boundary of a music video — often by not including any actual music.
“I just want this shot to be there, and I want it to be quiet,” Lazovick says. “Could it be quiet? No song? It’s just like you really hit the wall of what a music video should be, what it could be, and what it doesn’t need to be.”
Not only thunderous, thoughtful, melodic, and catchy, Voyeur also appear to stay grounded in the discipline required of the craft, in a city less and less hospitable to working artists.
“I feel like it’s so easy to get jaded about making music in New York City,” Lazovick says. “We try as best we can to realize how special that actually is. A lot of people would like to be playing music in New York City. It’s easy to be cynical, like, ‘Oh, everyone’s making rock music in New York.’ But that’s what New York is for.”
For a band of transplants, the filth of the city inspires more than the glitz of the scene.
“I remember right after COVID when everyone was like, ‘New York’s back,’ but it was all just about downtown Manhattan,” Lazovick says. “I remember walking around there, and I felt, whatever’s going on here, which I do kind of like, ‘I don’t think this is the stuff that made downtown Manhattan cool in the first place.’”
He continues: “Then you walk down Myrtle Avenue,” referencing his diasporic neighborhood. “I think it was these weird pockets where you’re like, ‘I don’t know where to go. Everything looks like trash and kind of dirty.’ I don’t like the pedestal that downtown New York gets put on. All of New York City is amazing and inspiring, and there are all these pockets. That’s what’s great about it.”
