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Whitney is an American indie-rock band from Chicago, which formed in 2015 and is signed to Secretly Canadian. The band was formed shortly after the breakup of member Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich's band Smith Westerns in late 2014. They released their debut album, Light Upon the Lake, in June 2016 and have toured internationally. – Wiki

Whitney make casually melancholic music that combines the wounded drawl of Townes Van Zandt, the rambunctious energy of Jim Ford, the stoned affability of Bobby Charles, the American otherworldliness of The Band, and the slack groove of early Pavement. Their debut, ‘Light Upon the Lake’, is due in June on Secretly Canadian, and it marks the culmination of a short, but incredibly intense, creative period for the band. To say that Whitney is more than the sum of its parts would be a criminal understatement. Formed from the core of guitarist Max Kakacek and singing drummer Julien Ehrlich, the band itself is something bigger, something visionary, something neither of them could have accomplished alone.

Ehrlich had been a member of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, but left to play drums for the Smith Westerns, where he met guitarist Kakacek. That group burned brightly but briefly, disbanding in 2014 and leaving its members adrift. Brief solo careers and side-projects abounded, but nothing clicked. Making everything seem all the more fraught: both of them were going through especially painful breakups almost simultaneously, the kind that inspire a million songs, and they emerged emotionally bruised and lonelier than ever.

Whitney was born from a series of laidback early-morning songwriting sessions during one of the harshest winters in Chicago history, after Ehrlich and Kakacek reconnected - first as roommates splitting rent in a small Chicago apartment and later as musical collaborators passing the guitar and the lyrics sheet back and forth. “We approached it as just a fun thing to do. We never wanted to force ourselves to write a song. It just happened very organically. And we were smiling the whole time, even though some of the songs are pretty sad.” The duo wrote frankly about the break-ups they were enduring and the breakdowns they were trying to avoid. Each served as the other’s most brutal critic and most sympathetic confessor, a sounding board for the hard truths that were finding their way into new songs like “No Woman” and “Follow,” a eulogy for Ehrlich’s grandfather.

Classic and modern at the same time, they revel in concrete details, evocative turns of phrase, and thorny emotions that don’t have exact names. These ten songs on 'Light Upon the Lake' sound like they could have been written at any time in the last fifty years. Ehrlich and Kakacek emerge as imaginative and insightful songwriting partners, impressive in their scope and restraint as they mold classic rock lyricism into new and personal shapes without sound revivalist or retro. “I’m searching for those golden days.” sings Ehrlich, with a subtle ripple of something that sounds like hope, on the track “Golden Days”. It’s a song that defines Whitney as a band. “There’s a lot of true feeling behind these songs,” says Ehrlich. “We wanted them to have a part of our personalities in them. We wanted the songs to have soul.” – Press Release

“Light Upon the Lake, their debut LP, is a short collection of short songs; half of them are made up of easygoing guitar flourishes, the other half feature woozy strings and slurred brass. This is the Corona of rock records, as Whitney consistently walk that fine line between identifiable and platitudinal. Take the chorus from most recent single “No Matter Where We Go”: “I can take you out/I wanna drive all around with you with the windows down/And we can run all right.” It’s so generically wistful that it could provoke an eyeroll, but it’s delivered with such gentle earnestness that it’s improbably touching. Light Upon the Lake operates in a universe of endlessly repeatable joy, with a touch of melancholy to keep it interesting. The songs could be about romantic love, but they’re open-ended enough to be whatever you want them to be.” – Pitchfork

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