ear are taking the scenic route

Less a band than a collaborative art project, ear have created a shared universe for two – intentionally closed, richly esoteric and all the more compelling for it. Time to listen in.

For a project that emerged from two minds working in their own esoteric registers, Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan spend a surprising amount of time apart. When the two members of ear appear on my screen – both with wild hair and looking a little groggy, the interview apparently the first thing on the day’s agenda – there’s a novelty to them being on the same call, in the same moment. They’re currently based on opposite sides of the US, though they caught some time together in the past week – their first stretch in a while: “That was nice,” Paz says drily.

This sense of physical distance between the duo has subtly moulded their second album. For now, though, it’s a timely reunion: ear are, suddenly, a band people are talking about – Pitchfork has taken notice, so did The Face while it still could, and the pressure of that attention is a new thing to navigate. The new album’s title, Rumspringa, takes its name from the Amish tradition in which young people are sent out beyond the community’s strict rules to encounter the wider world before deciding whether to be baptised back in. It’s a heavy frame for a record made largely on laptops, splicing together processed voices, clipped drums and square-waved synths, but it fits the duo – neither of whom are actually Amish – neatly, particularly at this moment. What they were both bringing to it was “a very childlike fear”.

Paz puts it more plainly. He knew there should be a song about “going out on your own, against your nature or against what you know”. In the months before they started writing, both were, separately, trying exactly that: “choosing yourself”, as he puts it – Paz in New York, Avtan, who is now back in California, a self-confessed nomad. By the time they started recording, the word felt inevitable. “It’s the perfect word, with all that imagery… kids out on the town in traditional clothing.”

If their debut record was a held breath, taut with the anxiety of not yet knowing what they were, Rumspringa is the exhale: looser, freer, less afraid. Released in 2025, The Most Dear and the Future (eight songs in 17 minutes, self-released after a run of singles) arrived almost the instant it was finished. It brimmed with ambient textures (glasses clinking, bird noises), hushed and mumbled vocal treatments, and aggressive-leaning amen breaks. “Basically seconds after finishing it, we were like, ‘OK, it’s gotta be out right now,’” Paz remembers. Underneath the urgency, there was a nagging feeling they’d undersold the project; that quietly uploading it to a free distribution platform was a way of not quite committing to what they’d made. Still, despite the low-key release, the record landed them a near-sold-out European tour and a cult fanbase hungry for whatever came next.

This time around, they gave themselves more room to breathe. They made Rumspringa in winter, knowing it would emerge into the world in spring, and, for the first time, built in months to work out how best to release something they actually believed in. That patience is also what made signing to A24’s fledgling music arm, where ear are among the first acts on the roster, feel “harmonious”. They wanted a formal step, Avtan explains, to “ensure it was the right choice”, and when they spoke to the label, “it seemed like they were willing to match us where we were at”. There’s an aesthetic logic, too: A24’s films trade in a certain kind of taste – the dreamlike, the slightly off-centre – and ear’s music, variously filed under glitch-pop, indietronica and laptop twee, occupies a parallel realm. You could drop them onto the soundtrack of I Saw the TV Glow and nothing would feel out of place. “There’s definitely something pretty arty about it,” Paz says of the fit between band and label, “but it’s also pretty accessible.”

The press materials for Rumpsringa describe ear not as a band but as a 50-50 collaborative art project, and the distinction is important to them. “We’re both fine artists, mainly,” says Paz, who insists the music was almost incidental. “Our first conversation was about music, so it made sense that’s what we’d do together. But in another universe, we could have done something completely different.” For him, the band is really “about compromise” – two people making something neither could create alone.

ear met at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (Paz already enrolled and Avtan arriving as a transfer student), where Avtan sat at Paz’s table on the first day of orientation. What he recalls of that day is the recognition that here was “another person who really wants to talk extremely seriously about music for no reason. And that was a really awesome thing.”

Out of that came something they can define only by feel. When pressed on what makes an ear song, both reach for the same word: “amorphous”, without fixed edges; something that could have been a film, an installation or a set of paintings, that just happened to come out as music. “To put rules on it would probably mess everything up,” Paz says, “but we definitely know it when we hear it.” Outside the project, their tastes diverge (Avtan gravitates towards hardcore and gabber, Paz to more folk and contemporary classical sounds); inside it, they “kind of just invented a shared sensibility, because we had to”. Asked for shared touchstones, their answer is a loose and eclectic mix of movements and bands, including but not limited to British post-punk, IDM and Sparklehorse. That invented language is one they guard carefully; they’ve always been more interested in the work speaking for itself than in explaining themselves.

From the start, ear’s music has fed on their actual lives: voices, field recordings, fragments lifted from the people around them. Their earliest songs sampled friends directly, almost as private gifts. “We thought it was cool if they were in it, even if they didn’t know,” Avtan says. On Rumspringa there are fewer familiar voices, but the textures are more densely detailed than ever: their crooning melodies oscillate between acoustic intimacy and electronic chaos, while sampling film clips and instructional tapes. “I don’t have many hang-ups about putting the personal in the music,” Paz says, “because that’s the point.”

The lyrics, by contrast, are whittled to almost nothing: fragmented, elusive, modernist shards. What survives is almost entirely to do with thresholds: leaving, arriving, waiting. “It’s funny that they’re elusive,” Paz says, “because to us they’re the most ultimate version of what they could be.” Most of their music, he reckons, is editing: you make the thing, realise it has too much in it and keep cutting “until it’s just the point”. Ne Plus Ultra, off their first record, a looping, spectral song built around a single repeated melodic fragment, “used to be a really long pop song. And then we only kept one lyric.”

In the studio, obscuring and abstracting is second nature, but on stage none of that is available to you. For both of them, performing did not come naturally. Avtan, a former choir member who never sang in front of people, came to it with stage fright fully intact. They started playing shows because the music was getting out there and needed a place to be fully embodied. “It’s not fun to see somebody do something they don’t want to do,” Avtan says, so they decided to actually want it, which, for ear, is a fairly typical, artful solution.

Paz recounts their live journey as comedy. These days, ear play to festival stages and audiences who know all their lyrics, but at their first show, they were playing songs nobody knew, dancing a little and feeling ridiculous. At the second, they resolved to stand still and be serious, which felt just as dumb. By the time they were supporting Yung Lean on a Canadian run in 2025, they’d decided: “If we’re not dancing to our own music, who is gonna dance?” This resulted in a show at Berlin’s LARK in January where they set up in a pit and built a mosh around themselves. “In the moment, it was terrible. We were stressed out.” Looking back, they think it’s probably one of their best live shows.

For all the aesthetics they enjoy building around the band, ear are wary of becoming figureheads of the bubbling but nebulous indie sleaze or electronica scene, thankfully something that hasn’t been forced on them just yet. “We just want people to listen to the music,” Avtan says. “We’re not trying to sell anything.” Part of their reticence to be part of something broader is protection: what they make feels personal enough that being lumped in with others chafes. Paz takes it further. ear, he argues, isn’t really social music. “I always think of it as headphones, by yourself. That’s how I listen to it.” He’d prefer they read as “representatives of the music, rather than the auteurs”. For now, with the duo scattered across the country, “it’s just songs”.

What he’s focused on is simply conjuring more of them, which comes with an added bonus. The reason they see each other at all these days, Avtan points out, is that they play shows, so another record is an excuse to be in a room together. “I’m really eager to see what those end up sounding like,” Paz says. “That’s kind of the point of this whole thing.”

By the end of our chat, the conversation has drifted pleasantly sideways: Avtan is talking about her sister in London, Paz is trying to describe an Australian musician called Banjo Ulysses whose song Vindicated he can’t stop playing. Despite the air of mystery around them, they are, it turns out, fairly natural ramblers. The editing isn’t something they do because the words don’t come easily, but because the words come too easily, and the whole project seems to be about knowing which ones to keep.