Rising: NEW YORK make music for walking around the city feeling cute

Sounds like: Deconstructed art-pop 
Soundtrack for: Late-night scrolling and dissociating 
File next to: The Femcels, ear, Bassvictim 
Our favourite song: city 
here to find them: @_n_e_w__y_o_r_k

The first thing to know about NEW YORK is that they’re not from New York.

Coumba Samba was born in Harlem, sure, but Gretchen Lawrence is from a suburb outside Tallinn, Estonia, while the band itself was born in a flatshare in London. The name is a misdirection, or, as Lawrence puts it, an accidental way to stay “undercover”. “There’s a Berlin, you know?” she shrugs. “So now there can be a NEW YORK.”

The duo met when Samba, “kind of low-key kicked out” of her last place, as Lawrence puts it – though Samba strongly disagrees – moved in with Lawrence and a mutual friend. “Coumba would host dinners or play music around the house,” Lawrence remembers. “And I was like, ‘Damn, you’re playing pretty cool music. I think our tastes align.’” Within a month, they were experimenting together, pulled in by a shared diet of Soundcloud rap and what Lawrence calls “footworky stuff”. It was all weird, niche and mostly faceless.

That anonymity crept into their early musical experimentation. Their first tracks drew heavily on royalty-free sample packs, and the pair still swear by the form. “It’s these simulation aesthetics where nothing is really dark,” Lawrence says. “Royalty-free music is always more upbeat and really weird, and the sounds are clashing in different ways. It’s non-music music.” That collaged, slightly uncanny pep runs through everything they’ve released, from their 2022 debut album No Sleep Till N.Y. to last year’s Push EP, via 2024’s double LP Rapstar*. It also extends to their own presence: they didn’t bother with an Instagram for the first few years.

They both arrived at music sideways. Samba, who studied violin and flute as a kid (“medieval instruments, kind of useless”), never really tried making her own tracks until NEW YORK; she has a parallel practice as a visual artist and graphic designer. Lawrence, meanwhile, was in a screamo band called The Shape at age nine, and paid her rent before NEW YORK as a VJ and video editor. 

Their formative listening pulls together a melange of millennial tastemaker-core: Samba grew up on Chief Keef, Arca, MIA and Ariana Grande; Lawrence on My Bloody Valentine, Miss Kitten, a compilation called Berlin Insane, which tried to bottle that city’s electroclash scene, and MIA. Again. For Samba, MIA was the reason to try making music at all: “Her beats were quite simple, and then it was just good melodies. The naturality, that way of making things easygoing and simple.” Lawrence frames it more structurally: MIA, she argues, mastered the recipe everyone’s now calling glitch-pop. “Every eight or 16 bars there’s a totally new vibe shift. It’s absurd and fun at the same time, even if the meaning behind the music can be quite serious.”

That vibe-shift logic governs how NEW YORK’s songs come together, too. Samba sings melodies into her voice memos; Lawrence layers them over experiments she’s been building in her library. “When something clicks, it clicks,” Lawrence says. The records emerge piece by piece.

Their growth has been similarly unhurried. The first album went up overnight, with no press push, travelling by word of mouth: friends telling friends, people running into old friends at their shows. They threw exactly one party – though they’ve since performed far less sparingly. “We’re into the concept of a slower journey,” Lawrence says, “where we can actually manage and understand and have space and time to focus on writing good music.”

This slow journey is, finally, picking up speed. New York are set to play Primavera and Dekmantel this summer, with a run of Australian dates in between – and they’re already deep in new material. The mission, though, has not changed. “We just want people to have fun and feel at ease,” Lawrence says. “A great soundtrack to walking around the city feeling cute.”