Model/Actriz: Come On Closer

Model/Actriz rocketed out of the New York underground in 2023 thanks to a debut that blended muscular, grinding rock with a flamboyant, theatrical streak – and a live show to match. For their highly anticipated follow-up, they’re bringing confrontation and charisma to the dancefloor 

It’s been a long time since the East Village – now a gentrified parody of its former self – had a thriving punk scene. But on this particular Wednesday evening in late March, New York’s hottest spot is Night Club 101, a tiny venue crammed next door to a dry cleaners on Avenue A. The space once housed the Pyramid Club, a historic epicentre of queer nightlife that hosted early performances by Madonna, among others. But tonight’s crowd is far too young to remember its 1980s heyday, when Basquiat and Keith Haring were regulars. Instead, they’re here to catch Model/Actriz, one of New York’s most thrillingly unhinged bands, as they preview material from their hotly anticipated sophomore album, Pirouette. 

Those lured in by the combustible noise-rock of the band’s powerful 2023 debut, Dogsbody, may be surprised by the sleek, dancier sensibility of the new tunes. By the time the quartet plays Cinderella, a new single on which vocalist Cole Haden exorcises childhood memories of closeted confusion, drummer Ruben Radlauer is shirtless, and the crowd throbs to the rhythm of an unholy, electroclash-infused beat. Bassist Aaron Shapiro and Radlauer, who exploits a cymbal stack as a clattering snare stand-in, lock into the groove with mechanical precision, while guitarist Jack Wetmore eschews conventional chords in favour of staccato screeches that resemble a faulty carbon monoxide detector.

But it’s the magnetic frontman, Haden, who brings the volatility. Dark-haired and mustachioed, his face shrouded by black shades, he prances across the stage, gyrating and performing high kicks, bringing his voice from a chant to a scream without warning. His lyrics blur sex and violence until they’re an indistinguishable mass (“With a body count/ Higher than a mosquito!” he recites on fan favourite Mosquito). Midway through the gig, he asks how many people are seeing Model/Actriz for the first time. Many hands shoot up. “For those of you who are new to our party,” he says, “this is the part where I meet the crowd.”

Then, as the band launches into Amaranth, a harsh industrial cut from Dogsbody, Haden descends from the stage and stalks through the crowd, confronting audience members one-on-one with his vocal outbursts. The room parts for him like the Red Sea, and fans instinctively hold his mic cord aloft as he zigzags through the crowd. At one point, a sweat-drenched Haden crouches to the floor for an entire verse, and everyone drops down with him. He has the audience in the palm of his hand.

When you’re at a Model/Actriz show, indifference isn’t an option. “It started in a place where I wanted to have a show where nobody could look away,” Haden tells me, reflecting on his penchant for confronting individual audience members, up close and personal. “It became more of an equal exchange of energy and, you know… shared intimacy.”

There are occupational hazards to such intimacy. Just ask Haden about the time a fan bit him during a gig on the Dogsbody tour. “It didn’t even feel like a malicious bite,” he laughs. “We were dancing and it felt like he wanted a taste. But it hurt.” Where was the nibble? “Right here” – Haden points to his right arm – “like the Bethany Hamilton bite.” Was he freaked out? “Yeah. It was like a curious shark.”

As for Night Club 101, “Maybe that show was more confrontational because people weren’t moving as much as I would have liked,” Haden, 28, admits. It’s a week after the show, and we’re chatting on the back patio of The West, a bar and coffee shop in Williamsburg, not far from where the singer lives. Radlauer, Shapiro and Wetmore smoke cigarettes and soak up the early spring sun as Haden arrives fashionably late, explaining that he’d mistakenly believed this was a Zoom interview. 

Clad in black cargo pants and a faded Arca sweatshirt, half of his fingernails painted black, Haden cuts an imposing figure with his curly mop of dark hair. A proudly queer artist with an affinity for pop divas (at one point, he makes a Sabrina Carpenter reference that none of his bandmates get), he’s not your typical noise-rock frontman. That’s why his bandmates sought him out in the first place, long before Dogsbody propelled them to Brooklyn-buzz-band prominence.

An early iteration of Model/Actriz, sans Shapiro, formed about a decade ago at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. All four members attended the prestigious music school, though they’re loath to talk about it, as Radlauer matter-of-factly explains: “We all have pretty strong feelings about art school being predatory. So, we just don’t want to encourage people to flush $200,000 down the toilet or get in debt.” 

Radlauer and Wetmore have known each other since childhood – their fathers played in a band together in the 80s, before they were born – and both came of age in and around the Los Angeles hardcore scene. But it wasn’t until college that they formed a band together, united by a shared interest in aggressive music that straddled a barbed-wire line between industrial and punk. The trouble was finding a singer who could add something interesting to the mix.

“There was a lot of macho stuff going on. And none of it was really hitting,” says Wetmore, 29. Radlauer, also 29, concurs: “We were playing loud music, and I think we were looking for people within that idiom. I think even Jack tried vocals once or twice.” Yet, they felt uninspired by the boilerplate hardcore vocal approach.

Then, in a Boston basement, they stumbled upon a then-19-year-old Haden doing a bizarre performance-art routine. It was “my version of a Laurie Anderson show”, Haden recalls, with “long, looong pop songs with meandering structures and spoken word. I had a keytar.” 

The eccentric teenager was writhing around on stage with fake blood and glitter. His future bandmates were captivated. “Seeing Cole doing something like that was probably more hardcore than what we were doing – but in a very art-pop context,” Radlauer says. “We were like, ‘Well, who knows?’ We basically took a risk, came up to him after the show, and were like, ‘Do you wanna join our band?’” 

Haden had never really collaborated with other musicians – “I saw myself as, like, doing my own thing,” he admits – but was flattered enough to say yes. Unlike his California-bred bandmates, he was a lifelong theatre kid from small-town Delaware who loved the musical Cats and had experienced a formative musical awakening when he saw Lady Gaga on the Monster Ball Tour in eighth grade. (Gaga, a longtime hero, gets a shoutout on Dogsbody.) Instantly, he injected Model/Actriz’s pummelling aggression with a shot of theatrical charisma. “He came in having literally never been in a band before and brought in a fully formed song to one of the demos we had sent him,” Radlauer recalls. “And it just… flowed.” 

With a revolving door of bassists, they began writing songs and gigging around Boston. But they struggled to write an album and, losing steam, eventually called it quits. Around 2019, after the members had all moved to New York, they restarted the band with a renewed sense of purpose and recruited Shapiro, an intense bassist with a metalcore background. (Standing 6ft 3in, with piercing blue eyes, he’s also a former runway model.)

The 2020 lockdown slowed, but did not kill, their momentum. Even under the best circumstances, writing together in New York wasn’t easy. “We shared a practice space with like 20 bands,” Radlauer says. “We would show up at our two-hour time slot, spend 30 minutes setting up and then be like, ‘OK, I’m tired.’” So, as the world opened up post-lockdown, the musicians made frequent trips to Vermont, where Shapiro’s parents live, and Pennsylvania, where Haden’s grandfather has a rural cabin, to write the material that eventually became Dogsbody.

The focus paid off. Released in February 2023, the album’s noise-strafed grooves and white-knuckle tension bumped Model/Actriz to the forefront of New York’s post-pandemic underground rock scene, alongside weirdo peers like Godcaster, Water From Your Eyes and Frost Children. It thrilled critics, too, with Pitchfork praising “the players’ precision attack and Haden’s white-hot charisma,” while Rolling Stone described it as “an album that you just know would ruin [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis’ day if he heard it.”  

The band had done their time touring to empty rooms, but now they were selling out clubs. “We played Poland [for] the first time and there was a line of people there to greet us after the show,” says Haden. “It was just a moment where you were reminded how special it is that you come to their home to play a show.”

They spent much of 2023 and 2024 on the road – eight months in the first year and six in the second, Shapiro estimates. Was it gruelling? Miserable? Fun? All of the above. “You wake up one day and three months have gone by and, like, I’ve only been home for a week,” Shapiro says. Diva, a noirish new track, sets some of Haden’s travel rendezvous to music.

The craziest thing that happened on tour? They met Skrillex at Lowlands in the Netherlands. “He got me into electronic music when I was 13,” Radlauer raves, describing the DJ as “really genuine”.

Some shows were revelatory (with or without leaving bite marks on band members). Others were awkward. In New York, in late 2023, they had the honour of opening for Interpol at the Beacon Theatre – a sit-down venue, unfortunately, which clashed with Model/Actriz’s usual MO. “Like 30 minutes before the set, they told us they’d shut off the power if Cole left the stage,” Radlauer recalls.

On one hand, it was hard to connect with a crowd of seated, Interpol-loving dads. On the other, Haden’s proud grandparents were in the audience that night. “We need to play a sit-down show occasionally so my grandparents can come,” the singer concedes.

Though recorded in the same Rhode Island studio as Dogsbody, with the same producer (Seth Manchester) overseeing it, Pirouette is worlds apart in both style and tone. Where the former drew from a clattering noise-rock vocabulary, drawing comparisons to The Jesus Lizard and Big Black, Pirouette is heady and beat-driven, with the exhilarating forward motion of dance-punk. It’s still harsh as hell (see: hyper-distorted outbursts like Ring Road). But tunes like Acid Rain and Baton, which Haden wrote as a tribute to his twin sisters and their love that he didn’t always appreciate, peel away the noise, making room for swooning vulnerability.

“When we were starting writing the album, we all agreed that we wanted to go to a hyper-bright place,” says Haden. “I mean, when we’re playing a show, we are hosts of a club for the night. And that was the kind of club I wanted to be in.” 

The band’s love of electronic music was a guiding force this time out, with Shapiro citing Floating Points and Burial as influences, while Haden was listening to “my regular pop girls” (he rattles them off mononymously: “Gaga, Janet, Kylie, Mariah…”). In recent years, the members have gone deep into dance music, too. “Our group chat is full of us sending each other timestamps in mixes,” Shapiro says. 

Wetmore, in particular, got into attending daytime dance parties at Nowadays, a club in Bushwick, where he drew inspiration from the DJs and club mixes. “Every now and then, we get a fucked-up one-minute voice memo at like 1 a.m.,” Radlauer laughs. Model/Actriz now seem to straddle two distinct musical ecosystems: they play on plenty of hardcore and punk-adjacent bills, but they’ve also performed at dance-heavy festivals like Making Time, where they spent days soaking in mind-bending DJ sets, an experience Wetmore describes as “transcendental”. 

The band’s shift in sonic approach has been accompanied by a lyrical evolution as well. On Dogsbody, Haden shrieked about sex with the tormented fervour of a revivalist preacher. Some listeners took it literally. (“I’ve read the Genius annotations and they’re like, ‘Yeah. His partner is sooo abusive,’” Haden mocks.) But as the band’s music moved into a brighter space, he challenged himself to set aside those personas and metaphors, and write as himself. “On this one, I think the intent was to be all the more literal, so there would be zero annotations on Genius.” 

And instead of yelping, he actually sings.

“I think on Dogsbody, I wanted to sing but I couldn’t,” Haden says. “Because the way I was feeling about myself was too harsh to allow me to feel like that was the appropriate outlet. The loneliness and bitterness I was feeling on that album could’ve been about the same topics Pirouette is about. But I think in order to get to a place where, on Pirouette, I’m singing to my inner child, I needed to do that with gentleness.” 

Indeed, the lyrics on Pirouette take a more autobiographical tack, with Haden reflecting on his sexuality and fraught childhood memories. On the meditative, spoken-word Headlights, which is set to spectral feedback whines, he describes the torment of a middle-school crush on a boy – how he prayed to God to make the boy “see me in all the ways I couldn’t”. On Cinderella, he imagines telling a date about how, aged five, he wanted a Cinderella birthday party but backed out at the last minute: “Quiet, alone and devastated.” 

“They all relate to my coming-out story,” Haden says of these vignettes. “And they relate to the pain I was carrying to now, that I didn’t want to carry with me any more. I wanted to, like, love it out of me.” The singer imagined himself speaking to the child who experienced those things, telling him: “This pain is worth getting through to get to the other side.”

That pain gets a cathartic release in the group’s confrontational, full-tilt live shows – something desperately needed in an age of right-wing authoritarian rule. As the band looks towards another gruelling touring cycle, Radlauer hopes to play some political gigs. “If any socialist politicians want us to play their fundraisers, holler,” he says.

Could they imagine Bernie Sanders introducing Model/Actriz at a rally? “We could quit,” Radlauer muses. “That would be the tip-top.”