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A blue milk crate full of hot dogs has arrived at Bowery Ballroom, where, on a recent balmy Friday, the band Laundry Day is inside rehearsing.
As the early-evening sun slants gold over Lower Manhattan, a few of the band’s pals emerge from the venue to distribute foil-wrapped glizzies to fans standing in a block-long line that began forming hours ago, in advance of the first of two sold-out Laundry Day shows here this weekend. The handful of young fans I speak to have all been listening to the band for years—well before their recent spate of consistent TikTok-and-Reels virality caught the attention of megastars like SZA, Matty Healy, and Drake.
There are no openers on the docket tonight—just the boys, putting on a hometown show. The members of Laundry Day seem wary, if excited, about the snaking line of ticket holders outside, though their 9:30 set won’t start for a few more hours.
Back inside, at center stage is lead singer Jude Ciulla Lipkin, soon to be 22; on a raised platform behind him is Sawyer Nunes, 22, the band’s polymath, who handles drums, guitar, and keys, as well as vocals. Flanking the stage, and rounding out the group, are two young men named Henry: guitarist Henry Weingartner, whom they call Henry, and bassist Henry Pearl, whom they call HP. (Uncannily, both Henrys, also 22, were born on the exact same day.)
“It’s not gonna be that packed,” says Sawyer, coolly. “It’s not like this is Billie Eilish at Coachella.”
Maybe not yet—but lately things are moving fast for Laundry Day. When I arrive at the venue, the band’s branding manager and former high school classmate Elias Gerstein, 22, who’s dressed the part in a gray suit and a Yankees cap, hands me a press kit one sheet while apologizing for its info being a little outdated. How outdated? I ask. “It’s from a week and a half ago,” Elias says.
If you first encountered Laundry Day on your TikTok or Instagram feed in the last six months or so, you might have assumed they were comedians—or, at least, a “band” in name only. Their social media output consists primarily of perfectly goofy riffs on popular songs harmonized with an exaggerated boy-band affectation, not unlike a hot-shot collegiate male a capella group doing an ambitious cover of “Hotline Bling.” Their most-viewed videos show the group, usually posted up on a New York City sidewalk in ragamuffin-y thrifted streetwear, covering a viral hit by 4batz, Tyla, or The 1975, scooping their voices deep into notes and leaving a trail of throaty Whoa-ohhhs and Yeah-h-hs worthy of a young Bieber, all while walking toward the camera like some kind of Zoomer barbershop quartet.
They have been compared, frequently, to the Lonely Island. (It helps that Jude is a dead ringer for a “Lazy Sunday”–era Andy Samberg.) The punchline beyond the punchline, though, is how angelic their voices actually sound. On a clip of Jude warbling his way through the Frank Ocean sample from Drake’s song “Virginia Beach”—“I bet your mother would be proud of you-UUU-ooo / yeahhh-YEAHHH-yuh”—one of the top comments reads: “The riff was too clean for this to be funny.”
Just two days earlier, the band had played on its flashiest stage yet: Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, to a crowd of 19,000 Ed Sheeran fans, on the occasion of the English pop megastar’s one-night-only show celebrating his sophomore album X’s 10th anniversary. A member of Sheeran’s team suggested Laundry Day as the local openers, an opportunity they’re sure they clinched because of their success on TikTok. Ahead of the show, Ed and the boys filmed themselves pedaling through Fort Greene on CitiBikes while harmonizing to the singer’s 2014 hit and first-dance wedding standard “Thinking Out Loud.” (“He was such a sport,” says Sawyer.) The video’s since racked up over half a million likes on Instagram.
Playing to a room that big, to fans they admit probably had no clue who they were, was surreal. They’d brought their own merch to sell at Barclays; despite the aforementioned 19,000 concertgoers in attendance, they sold precisely four T-shirts.
The members of Laundry Day have been best friends and surprisingly prolific bandmates for nearly eight years—more or less from the moment they first met, in 2016, as freshmen at Beacon High, a selective public school in the midtown Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. They’ve been playing shows for years, have toured abroad with Clairo, The 1975, and Teezo Touchdown, and released five studio albums. But their candid, genuinely funny social media presence—and the A-lister attention it’s attracted—has become the kind of marketing jet fuel (and authentic, intimate “brand building”) a room of record-label execs could only dream of.
Tonight, they may be amped, but they’re not green. Laundry Day has played Bowery Ballroom before, back in 2020; Sawyer is delighted his phone reconnected to the Wi-Fi when they arrived. But they’ve never done two sold-out hometown shows back-to-back, just days after opening for Ed Sheeran at Barclays. This feels new. This feels like it’s theirs.
They’ve got a kind crew of friends around them, many of them pals from Beacon High School—enough, in fact, that several of the homies I meet ask if I, too, went to Beacon. The band’s photographer, Camilla French, 22, is a total boss, weaving around the venue, nimbly climbing up into an eagle-eyed perch onstage. When she first met the boys back at Beacon—they were all in the same year—Laundry Day was already her top-played artist on Spotify, a secret she kept from them until long after they’d become friends. Since then, she’s been here for pretty much every chapter; documenting the band became her photography education, and she and Jude edit the music videos together. For the close peers in Laundry Day’s orbit, the band’s continued existence has felt like one of the most consistent things about the tumultuous last eight years.
Up in the Bowery Ballroom green room, Skivon Hardy, 24, an immediately convivial dude who has the Pink Panther’s face and matching pink leopard spots dyed into his bleach-blond buzz cut, is posted up on a couch with his camcorder, next to a low coffee table outlaid with the requisite rider sundries: a case of glass-bottled Stella Artois and a box of assorted Fruit Roll-Ups. After meeting the band via Sawyer back in 2022, Skivon became their part-time producer and videographer, part-time social media whisperer, although he describes his current role as being more akin to “the ultimate homie.”
“I do a little bit of everything,” he says. “If they’re a sports team, I’m like the mascot.”
Just before showtime, the guys rush to put on the custom Yankees uniforms they ordered for the occasion, finagling their mic packs through their pinstripe jerseys and pants. “Is the tuck clean?” wonders Jude, who understandably seems like he’s got a million thoughts running through his head. The first song on the set list is their latest single, “Why Is Everyone a DJ?,” a rollicking rock song that spins up an earworm-y snippet they’d been riffing on for months on TikTok: “I just ran outta money / The whole world’s tryna bring my ass down.” The lyrics read like a semi-autobiographical internal monologue of the band’s last few years—being broke, not having a prom, not going to college—that also pokes fun at themselves and their whole milieu. The abject loop-de-loop of trying to make it. The chorus ends on an upswing: “But maybe it all comes back around.”
Later, when I ask the guys about how they describe the music they make, Sawyer determines the main throughline of their sound is funk, though he admits this is up for debate. The songs generally err on the side of sunny, atmospheric exuberance. Musically, it’s a contemporary-genre smoothie, with discernible notes of historic boy-band varietals from Odd Future to Brockhampton, Ben Folds to the Beatles; their sense of humor is in this same lineage. (When I first connected with the band over Zoom to discuss this story, they were quick to point out they’d been featured in GQ once before: as high school seniors, in a fan-on-the-street fashion slideshow shot in the pouring rain outside a Tyler, the Creator show at Madison Square Garden.)
Onstage, the guys are raucous but focused. Jude is locked in, and between his clean melodies and the sing-rapping, he sounds, at moments, like a Justified-era Justin Timberlake. He riles up the crowd, telling them they’re in for a treat tonight, then asking if they want to know why. “Because you’re watching Laundry Day from New York City, bitch!”
Compared to the enormity of Barclays, there’s a feeling that the attentive crowd here, in this 600-capacity venue, is still in on a secret—a feeling Jude appears to acknowledge mid-set, when he pauses during a moment of relative stillness and tells the room, “It’s just us here tonight.”
The next afternoon, I met back up with the guys at Sawyer’s place in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg, the band’s de facto headquarters. It’s a railroad apartment, decorated in lively and boyish fashion—thumbtacked maps, colorful paintings, a dart board, and posters from jazz festivals and past Laundry Day shows. There’s a twin bed in the middle of the living room, and a small but mighty recording setup in an alcove off the bedroom. Skivon, who lives on Staten Island, crashed on the twin bed last night, which is more or less exactly what it’s there for.
As the boys roll in, they report on what they’ve eaten since they last saw each other, approximately 12 hours ago: Sawyer and Skivon made a deli run for chopped cheeses when they got home in the middle of the night. HP passes around his phone to show a picture of the breakfast—a full plate of eggs and avocado—he’d just finished at a nearby diner. Jude, who took the train in from his studio in Lower Manhattan, produces a loaded bagel sandwich from a brown paper bag; excitingly, a fan recognized him during the bagel run. When Henry arrives, he wishes he had a cold brew.
Sawyer, who’s got on silky cargo pants and a T-shirt printed with the same “Ignore Alien Orders” emblem that was stickered on Joe Strummer’s Telecaster, offers tea to the room; he prepares a cup of chamomile for HP, who’s currently wearing a blue cap-sleeve baby tee but will later change into a pink T-shirt printed with Laura Palmer’s glass-eyed portrait from Twin Peaks. Jude is wearing baggy basketball shorts, a camo Yankees cap, and—despite the toasty Saturday afternoon heat—a pair of black Uggs. Henry’s in a plaid shirt and his usual beat-up John Fluevog boots.
Sawyer hoists a computer chair into the kitchen for me to sit on, and I face out toward the boys as they settle onto the twin bed, the floor, the couch. They’re all still shaking off the exhaustion from last night’s show, which is where we begin our debrief.
“I didn't know if we'd look out in the crowd and it'd be all these dudes that think our videos are funny,” says Jude. Having walked around the crowd a fair amount during the show myself, I did notice several clusters of young guys sporting camp-collar shirts and swoopy TikTok haircuts hanging around toward the back of the crowd, who may or may not have been entirely prepared for a 90-minute concert of original music when they showed up to see the funny a cappella dudes from their For You page. “I think they were in the back,” I say.
The newcomers seemed down for the full Laundry Day experience; whether the band can replicate that crossover on a mass scale, turning people who’ve enjoyed their viral comedy into true fans of their actual songs, is the proverbial task at hand.
This challenge aside, it was, we all agree, an exceedingly welcoming crowd. The boys recognized some longtime fans in the first few rows, several of whom they know by name. “Obviously, the girls are going to hold you down,” Jude says. “They're going to bring the energy.”
The Laundry Day guys have a sweet, easy camaraderie that’s reflective of their eight (ostensibly contiguous) years of close friendship. Jude and HP both grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; Henry in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens. Sawyer spent his early childhood in New Orleans but ended up in New York City to perform on Broadway, appearing in several productions including Finding Neverland, and finally landed here for high school at Beacon.
On the first day of their freshman year in 2016, 14-year-old Sawyer and Jude met while wearing the same shoes. The “general” black-and-white Adidas NMDs, Sawyer clarifies, “not the hype ones. We were Foot Lockering it.” They connected over their shared musical-theater pasts, and quickly started making music together on GarageBand. With access to Beacon’s resources, they wrote and recorded songs during lunch, with their classmates the Henrys and Etai Abramovich, Laundry Day’s now-departed fifth member, joining in soon after.
They took themselves and this new endeavor seriously right away. They put the songs on SoundCloud. They started cold-emailing venues and booking gigs. By spring of their sophomore year, they’d released an independent debut EP, 2018’s Trumpet Boy.
It was around then that they experienced their first brush with the deus ex machina of the internet: A fortuitous repost from a popular Brockhampton fan account speed-boosted their follower count, and at their next live show they finally saw new faces beyond their friends and family. Before the end of their junior year, they’d made two more albums. (Their 2019 EP Homesick was co-produced with Brockhampton’s Romil Hemnani; its wistful final track, “Friends,” earned the band some pickup after it was featured in a season-finale episode of the Netflix teen dramedy On My Block.)
They became a rising indie band—the kind that gets slotted into opening for Clairo and The 1975 and playing festivals like Austin City Limits and Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw, which they accomplished the summer before their senior year.
“We were on top of the world,” remembers Jude, matter-of-factly.
“It was the best time of our life,” adds Henry. He can recall this moment acutely. “We were seniors in high school, and then we played at Bowery Ballroom on January 25, 2020. We played at the Roxy on February 21, 2020, we went back to school, and we…didn’t go back to school.”
You, too, may remember March 2020—everything stalled, but who knew for how long? Still, based on their latent buzz, Laundry Day signed a deal with Warner Music that June. The group used the money to rent a house in West Kill, a small town in upstate New York, for a few months. Socially, it was a blast; professionally, it was a fever dream.
“We had more fun being 18, cooking different dinners every night, and playing PS4 than we did actually having to work on something that was always a hobby,” says Sawyer. “The pressure made us crack in a way where we just kind of made the most insane shit. I remember so vividly our A&R being like, ‘You're trying to make Sgt. Pepper instead of Help! right now.’”
“Not even Sgt. Pepper,” Jude yelps. “Magical Mystery!”
Camilla, their photographer, joined the band at the Catskills house in summer 2020, after her own rough few months at home during the pandemic. “To be back with the boys who just give me so much joy and they're so caring, it totally revived me,” she’d told me the previous night at the venue. Hardly any of the music they made upstate landed on their heady major-label debut, 2022’s We Switched Bodies, but Camilla still reminisces about the time she and Henry cooked “a glizz Wellington” for the whole crew.
All the while, the band had been rebuffing its label’s request to make content for the internet. “Our mindset was like, Let's not post on social media at all. Let's not tease anything.…We were so secretive about everything because we thought that was cool,” says Jude, seemingly still kicking himself for it. (Early on during the pandemic, prior to getting on TikTok, Jude would go live on his backup “finsta” Instagram account to chat with the small crew of fans gathered there, like being on FaceTime with a friend. The iceberg goes deep.)
At the time, Sawyer explains, “I remember us just being like, ‘This is so dumb.’ This is the music industry now, that someone's going to sit here and be like, ‘This is what TikToks are.’” In 2022, they managed to change their own minds when, as a joke and a bit of a dig at the label’s directive, Sawyer filmed Jude play-singing Frank Ocean’s chorus from Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “No Church in the Wild”—and stumbled on what would become a winning strategy.
“That was me in the backwards hat,” Jude remembers, “and I was like, ‘What's a king to a god?’” The clip got a million views in a day.
It was a trip to see the video blow up, HP says, “because I was like, Wait, that's literally what we do, just we don't film it most of the time.”
Henry reiterates: “The silly singing videos, they're musical. It’s very Glee. A lot of the comments are about the harmony of it all.”
The post-pandemic slog churned on, and when Warner heard the band’s next batch of songs—what would become its fifth EP, 2023’s Younger Than I Was Before, which eventually clocked in at 26 tracks, eight of them skits—the record label dropped them. (The band later produced a documentary about this whole process, which it screened for one night only at the Village East movie theater this past January.) They were down bad, still in merch debt from their last tour. Then, over the holidays at the end of 2023, their drummer Etai went on a monthlong meditation retreat. When he got back to the city, he decided to leave the band.
Afterwards, during a group meeting at HP’s apartment in early January, “the four of us were together and we had to look at each other and be like, ‘Do you want to be doing this?’” Henry recalls, soberly. “Nobody hesitated.”
Their relationship with Etai is amicable, but his departure was a huge shift, and the emotions around it are still tender. Not only had they been a band of five for the last seven years, but they’d been buddies for just as long. Plus, as HP posits later, “There was a fire under our ass because all of our friends are just graduating college now. In January, Etai quit the band and we were like, ‘All right, what are we going to have to show for the four years we just spent not getting a degree?’ Like, we would've all probably gone to college if not for this band.”
(Spending time with Laundry Day, I am periodically reminded of how acutely unfair it is that people had to graduate high school in the year 2020. On “Why Is Everyone a DJ?”, Jude wails, “Still mad we never got a prom / I wonder how she would’ve looked in her gown / But she's dating a girl now / When I found out all I had to say was wow.” It’s a goofy line, but when you know the backstory it hits like pressing on a bruise.)
After Etai left, the remaining four went into overdrive, pumping out more jokey videos, trying to overthink them as little as possible. Skivon showed them how to download and remove the watermark from their TikToks so they could start cross-posting them as Instagram Reels. (They discovered an app where you could download two a day without having to pay for it, so they’d parse it out accordingly.) By the end of January, there was another vibe shift, thanks in part to a seven-second video the band amusingly refers to as “Merrily”—a spoof of a twee, TikTok-viral song called “I Wouldn’t Mind” by the indie pop band He Is We. The clip shows Jude and Sawyer standing on the corner of First Avenue and East Second Street, singing a fratty two-line ditty that goes: “Merrily we snort up these lines (up these lines) / I’m locked with my brothers and we’re vibing every night.”
“We were like, ‘If you go downstairs right now and you sing that in a funny voice, it would get a million views,’” Henry says. They did just that: They recorded it in one take, posted it, and by the time they got off the train next, the views were soaring. (Mine among them—the first I learned of Laundry Day was when I came across “Merrily” on Reels earlier this year.) Drake followed the band on IG a few days later, and, as Jude recalls, “It was just a whirlwind of shit.”
(Drake, the most online guy of them all, had previously DM’d the boys about their song “Crazy Stupid Love,” a woozily atmospheric track whose conundrum of a refrain—“So if I fuck myself to love you / Distance makes the heart grow fonder”—would honestly sound great sampled on a Drake song.)
The six months since “Merrily”—which currently has over 10 million views on TikTok—have felt like an entirely new chapter. They’ve got a million ideas, and at each new juncture they’ve demonstrated a refreshing willingness to pivot. They went on the rowdy college-tour circuit this spring, and after their videos caught the attention of alt-rap prince Teezo Touchdown, he invited them to open his European tour.
“[Teezo] was talking about how it was going to be his first headlining tour, and we were just kind of mind-blown by that,” says Jude.
“’Cause we've done like, four,” adds HP.
Even while they seize the opportunities wrought by their newfound virality, Laundry Day is thoughtful about the machine at hand. They’re aware that what they’re doing is now pretty much exactly what labels (and their social media divisions) want from their artists: to consistently, and seemingly organically, drum up buzz and affection online. The guys have heard, from friends with ears on the ground, that their name is being dropped in label-marketing meetings. Nearly every musician is gunning for virality these days—or bemoaning having to do so—and some of the band’s alt-pop peers, such as the musician Role Model, have recently pivoted toward irreverent sing-songy humor on TikTok.
“We realized what's going to make us special is people wanting to be with us and wanting to hang out with us,” says Jude. At the show last night, he “felt that energy in real life…like everyone wanted to be there with us. It wasn't just they want to hear this song, it wasn't just, ‘I want to take a picture with you.’” Everyone wanted to be in on it. In the meantime they’ve leaned into the bit, filming music-less skits and teaming up with popular local TikTok personalities like the comedian Veronika Slowikowska, known on the platform as @veronika_iscool.
“I think the longer people don't know we make music, the better,” admits Sawyer. “Honestly, ’cause I think it just gives us time—”
“—we’re just going to keep getting better,” adds Jude.
If the last four years of Laundry Day have been a holistic learning experience, the members are also an impressive testament to their fraternal continuity. They’ve been this close for nearly half their lives. Looking at photos of them from over the years makes for a moving visual timeline of their shared adolescence and young adulthood thus far; you can chart their maturation by their haircuts, which shift from long to short, shaggy to bleached, buzzed, mulleted, and candy-hued. All four guys are in long-term relationships. This, Sawyer says, has “been great for all of us individually and just as a collective of people. It's been amazing to have a support system and friends and girlfriends who all know each other.”
“Imagine we were all single,” mutters HP, which elicits some sheepish laughs. “That would have been so bad.”
Given that they are a group of 21- and 22-year-old guys who play music, I can imagine this. “Well, it is kind of unique,” I start to say, “for, like…”
“A rock band?” offers HP.
“We are totally old people,” maintains Henry. “We've just all grown up together with each other's partners and know each other very well, and we've all been through the ringer together.” Indeed, if the boys of Laundry Day come across on TikTok as fuckboys—of the brews, bros, and merrily-snorted lines variety—they appear to be the near total opposite in real life. They’re not huge partiers; they seem most keen on just hanging with the freaking boys. Again, they’ve mainly spent their young-adult leisure time with one another.
Most days, according to Henry, “it's a lot of this.” Here in Sawyer’s cozy living room, three of the boys have pooled into their usual spots on the L-shaped couch: HP sprawled on the chaise, Sawyer resting his legs on Henry’s shins. Jude and Skivon are splayed out on the twin bed, AirDropping and editing video footage from the night before on their respective phones. This is their home base.
“We spend every day together,” says Henry.
“Pretty much,” says Sawyer.
“More than ever,” says Jude, who had a relevant realization after hanging out with the famously stoic Ed Sheeran: “You have to be a different breed to be a solo artist.”
In March, the band signed to the Warner-partnered label R&R, the same imprint that reps milieu-shaping artists Dijon and Mk.gee, the latter of whom established his own quietly huge solo venture over the last year. For the guys, both acts feel like a blueprint. Per Jude, “Obviously they do it a lot differently as far as the way they promote themselves, but the musical credibility…to be associated with them, is pretty sick.”
Their admiration—of Mk.gee’s prowess as a live performer, of Sheeran’s iron-clad business savvy, for example—shapes their ambition. They want to be doing this until they’re “gray and old, playing Fenway Park or something—or Yankee Stadium, I should say,” says Sawyer. They’re excited by the prospect that, whenever their own sold-out day at Barclays comes, they might not still be playing songs they wrote in high school. When the band opened for Ed, they played one of their bigger hits, the pining pop ballad “Jane,” which is one they normally ask the crowd to hold up their phone lights for. That night, Jude was watching and thinking about one day looking out at the crowd and seeing 19,000 lights just for Laundry Day.
“People thought we had our [shot], we were right there,” says Jude, thinking back to 2019, to their first brush with success and the record deal. “We're getting another chance right now.” The guys have an ongoing tradition where, on New Year’s, they like to tell each other this next one is going to be the best year of their lives. This time around, everything has felt more surreal than ever. “It just feels like we're new again, a little bit,” he adds. “We had a lot of things kind of drag us down and make you feel like, fuck, we've been doing this for so long. And now last night felt like our first show.”
Next up, the plan is more of the same. Bigger, better. Record more music, film more videos, book more shows, which they’ll probably drive to themselves in their passenger van. (Locally, they’ll be playing at the Rockaway Hotel on August 23.) But first up, they’ve got another sold-out Bowery show to play tonight.
“And then on Monday, we'll probably come here,” says Henry, casting his eyes over the snug kingdom of Sawyer’s living room, where the rest of the guys have already resigned to scrolling their respective TikTok feeds. “And do this.”
