Who is Ray Bull?

That question has been the engine behind one of the internet’s most fascinating indie breakthroughs. Is it one guy? Two? A viral account spiraling into a music project? Ray Bull has spent their existence purposefully blurring these lines. They are artists and they are musicians; they are deeply serious and terminally online; they are a pop group and an art project. With their new album, Please Stop Laughing, they finally offer an answer to the question of who they are, mostly by further obfuscating it.

Aaron Graham and Tucker Elkins make up Ray Bull, but they function less like a traditional band and more like a continuous, living feedback loop. They met while in college at Cooper Union, not as musicians, but as visual artists. Graham focused on images, Elkins on film. When they reconnected years later at a gallery show in Brooklyn, they realized they had both been privately drifting toward music. They moved into a loft in Bushwick, and the lines between their lives and their art began to dissolve.

This multidisciplinary background explains their initial rise. Knowing nothing about the music industry, they leaned on what they did know: storytelling and image-making. They treated their band identity as a malleable medium. Early viral success came from a series called “Did You Know,” where they utilized Photoshop and jarring video transitions to weave fictional, experimental narratives about celebrities. It was a play on reality, a test of what the audience would believe, an accessible format that devolved into experimental media. A similar logic applied to their “Songs That Are The Same” series, where they played two popular songs simultaneously to reveal a magical, uncanny sync. Word began to spread, and Ray Bull quickly amassed over 600k followers on TikTok and another 500k on Instagram; these followers soon became fans of the band’s original songs, to the tune of over 40mm global streams.

All of this was content, sure, but it was also a manifesto: Ray Bull sees the continuous thread running through art and pop culture and rearranges it to fit their own design. That design was forged in the physical proximity of their apartment. Please Stop Laughing is the sound of two people living, sleeping, and creating on top of one another. The writing process wasn’t just collaborative; it was osmotic. One would play piano in the living room while the other shouted melodies from the kitchen. The song “Under Your Eyelid” serves as the perfect artifact of this environment. Elkins, hearing a melody drifting from Graham’s room, pulled out his phone to Shazam it, hoping to add it to his library. When it came up empty, he realized it was Graham. He walked into the room, they jumped on the track together, and the result is a seamless fusion of their instincts.

The album reflects this “everything at once” mentality. It creates a sonic world that feels familiar yet distinctly fresh and new, borrowing from the sheen of 80s synth-pop, the intimacy of 70s Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters, and the polished hooks of contemporary Top 40.

“It almost seemed like Please Stop Laughing was going to be an identity crisis. It felt existential,” says Graham. “The record could have been a folk record, easily. It could have been a pop record, easily.” But rather than choose a lane, they chose the collision. The relationship between the two is felt most strongly in the friction between the tracks. “Marry a Skater” carries an irony and humor that feels lifted directly from their private banter (“I got a friend,” sings Graham, “He spent a year in the Bahamas / working on his manners”), while “All That You Are” offers a darker, more complex view of duality. Elkins describes the latter as coming from “an unreliable narrator who is being an indecisive, hypocritical idiot.”

Ray Bull was never going to be a band in the traditional sense because neither Elkins nor Graham set out to be musicians. They set out to be artists, and music just happened to be the most effective canvas. “We can be chameleons,” says Elkins. “We like working with variation.” Please Stop Laughing is the result of five years living and creating on top of each other. The album is an honest reflection of a manufactured identity, and the beautiful, messy dynamics of two artists working as one.

One night in the winter of 2022, Maya Bon and Ryan Albert—the duo behind Hudson Valley-based band Babehoven—were hunkered down at home to watch the snow. They turned their living room furniture around to face the window and lit candles around the house, the glow lapping at the dark. It was dusk; the sky smoldered to cerulean. It was a moment that felt lit from within, cozy and transcendent, as they witnessed the blue world together.

It’s this image that shines at the heart of the band’s latest full-length album, Water’s Here In You—a tender light gleaming in the darkest part of the year, the warmth of home and companionship offering refuge from the cold. Across twelve varied and meticulous tracks, Babehoven offers their take on finding connection, groundedness, and growth in what we all carry within us.

The phrase that became the album title appears in the song “My Best Friend Needs,” written in the aftermath of a friend’s car accident: “Water’s here in you / it is here in me too. / It’s the blue lines dancing through you,” Bon sings. It’s the kind of delicate wisdom that a friend might give in a time of need, a reminder of our innate power and ability to move through intensity. “I felt that it encapsulated the meaning of loving through the pain, of seeing into the core of someone,” Bon explains. “I pictured the blue veins of the human body; how in some ways, they mimic the blue veins of water flowing across the earth. No matter how ferociously the fires of life may burn,” she adds, nodding to the flames that leap on the album’s cover, “we carry the water within us.”

Written and recorded at the duo’s home studio throughout the winter of 2022–2023, Water’s Here In You comes close on the heels of the band’s debut album Light Moving Time, which followed an impressively prolific canon of shorter releases dating back to 2017 when Bon founded the project in college. This latest album continues the thread of the band’s sonic DNA—blending hyper-melodic indie and folk rock with shades of shoegaze and the occasional nod toward country—but what sets it apart is the nature of the collaboration at its core. For the first time, Albert—who has operated as instrumentalist, producer, and engineer on past releases—joins forces with Bon as a songwriter, lending new depths to their musical partnership. It’s a fruitful collaboration that has led the duo to new and surprising chord choices and song structures, resulting in a collection of their biggest-sounding material to date. The songs unfold like fractals—often cyclical and spiraling outward from the center—with Bon’s lyrics and melodies cresting and compounding over Albert’s harmonic bedrock.

As they’d done in the past, the pair first set out to demo a batch of songs that Bon had written alone, but when they found themselves writing more collaboratively, they switched gears. “Every time we’d write a new song together, we became transfixed with it.” She struggled to let go at first, even as she knew their co-written songs were special, and evidence of their growth as collaborators. “I was able to push through the discomfort of trying something new and allow the joy of creating to shine light into the cavernous spaces of possessiveness and fear.”

Bon takes daily walks around the Hudson Valley area, wandering down trails through meadows and woods. Having grown up in Topanga Canyon, California, she’s no stranger to pastoral environments, and this proximity to the natural world filters into her lyrics, which extol both the beauty and increasing instability of her environs. On Mount Eerie-esque “Millennia,” Bon talk-sings of capitalist detritus washed away by raging floods, while on “Rocket,” lightning cracks and “the rain sounds like a scream.” Meanwhile, on organ-driven incantation “Lonely Cold Seed,” her pure, chilling vocals rise and recede like glacial melt atop a storm of distortion as she sings of a bird in a birch tree and a seed in the cold ground, wondering what will happen to these life forms in winter: “Who can find root here?” 

These themes trace back to Bon’s passion for environmental and human rights issues, “especially when it comes to existential dread and confusion about how to live in times of such precarity.” She uncovers moments of wonder and revelation amidst the dread, steeped in a desire to create home. Across these songs, human and natural forms coalesce, evoking a sense of the numinous. “You are wind, you’re desire / you are stems and leaves and washed out streets,” she sings on “Millennia,” an echo of the blue veins and blue rivers that gave rise to the album’s title. Later, on “Lightness is Loud,” she invokes elements of flora and fauna—the coral and the snake—that curl inside her as an emblem of tenderness and protection. And on “Ella’s From Somewhere Else,” she references the metaphysical—“I am porous”—in what feels like a nod to Emerson’s “transparent eyeball”: in observing nature, we become it.

Elsewhere on the album, Bon turns an eye toward human relationships, reflecting on various forms of love, with a gesture towards reconciliation and forgiveness. On album opener and lead single “Birdseye”, she examines the trickier intricacies of being in relationship with one another. Bon wrote the song after reconnecting with an estranged family member who was gravely ill. “Life is fragile and fleeting,” she reflects. “I think about the thinness of this realm and the mysterious other, breaking open to the mystery, leaving skin and flesh behind.” Understanding this fragility comes with a softening: “With hands outstretched / I forgive you,” she sings. 

With Water’s Here In You, Babehoven has crafted something intricate and memorable, their own Spiral Jetty of melody and sound—built from the darkness of mud and the sparkle of salt—with lyrics that feel embedded in the land. The album is a rallying cry for camaraderie in the face of life’s challenges, resonating like a divining rod leading us to the source of our own strength: the water inside us, connecting us, nourishing us. It is an invitation, an offering, and a suggestion that we are at our best together. “We all need each other, especially now,” Bon says, reaching out a hand.