Start Listening To: Worthitpurchase

Los Angeles duo Worthitpurchase discuss suburban nostalgia, resisting labels and building their latest record one in-person session at a time.

Worthitpurchase’s music lives in the overlap between sharp songwriting and experimental sound design, a space where intimate stories meet the textures of early internet memory. Longtime friends Omar and Nicole have been trading ideas since 2015, but their new album marks a shift, written entirely together in the same room after years of long-distance collaboration. Across its tracks, they explore feelings of disconnection, the optimism and disillusionment of tech culture, and the strange comfort of revisiting sounds and images from a not-so-distant past. We spoke with the pair about crafting in-character songs, their time at the legendary Tiny Telephone studio and why they will always keep things DIY.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make? 

O: We are a two-piece from Los Angeles, CA. We are longtime friends who have been co-writing and recording each other’s songs since 2015. I view the band as an experimental recording project inspired by our favorite songwriters and favorite electronic acts. We like fusing both of those worlds. 

N: I think the music we make just depends on what we’re obsessed with at the time. This new record is a study on suburban American life and what it felt like to watch your first YouTube video. 

‘Something New’ feels like a strong opening statement for the record. What sparked that song, and why did it feel like the right one to lead with? 

O: We just thought it was fun! A lot of the songs on our last record bordered on “kinda heavy” and this one just felt really fresh and new when we made it. It’s sung in-character and that was also very new for us at the time. 

You curated this album over several years. What changed for you creatively or personally between your earlier, more spontaneous records and this one? 

N: I lived in San Francisco from 2016-2024, so all of our last records were stitched together from recordings I would make there and with Omar in LA. We quickly realized how frustrating it was to not be working on the same songs in the same room... this LP follows a new approach for us in the recording process. We started only working on songs together in real life, so I’d come to LA a lot, and then ended up moving down as well. We had so many songs recorded already over the last few years, and ended up picking which ones were going to fit together. In the past, we’d write everything as we were working on a record and then release it, and a theme would retroactively fall into place. I guess you could say this time around it was a little more “curated”. 

The album explores a feeling of not quite fitting in with your surroundings. What made that theme feel important to explore at this point in your lives? 

N: Haha. I don’t really know anyone right now that doesn’t feel out of place. 

This is your first album since expanding Worthitpurchase into a live act. Has performing these songs affected the way you write or produce music now? 

O: This isn’t actually our first album “since expanding into a live act”, we started playing shows before we even had any music out in 2019-2020. Then Covid happened, and next thing we knew, Nicole and I were living in different cities, but still doing the band. We would still book and play shows, just less frequently.

Sometimes I would even play shows under Worthitpurchase or my own name in LA just to try out new material and have fun with things. We have always trusted the process of playing shows to test out new songs. 

You’ve been called “Mazzy Star for Gen Z.” Do you see yourselves as part of a dream pop or shoegaze tradition, or do you feel more rooted in something like the digital or DIY space? 

O: Everybody wants to call every new song or band “shoegaze” right now and it’s so annoying to me. I feel like there are only like ten real shoegaze bands, and most of them didn’t even want to be called that. It’s such a misnomer to me. At the core of the shoegaze ethos is an intense attention to detail in the sound and a commitment to abstracting your playing + sound. Pierre Schaeffer had it right with “acousmatic sounds”. 

N: We are a DIY band and always will be. 

Working at Tiny Telephone must have had a big impact on your sound. How did access to that studio and its gear shape the textures and tone of the new album? 

O: Working at Tiny will be forever important to me. That place was magic. It’s insane that it was able to exist for as long as it did. It basically taught me everything. I knew things before I worked there, but the engineers there completely molded my putty brain, and I am forever changed. It taught me how to be an engineer. 

N: Yeah, it was an incredible opportunity to be able to learn and work in a place with so much amazing gear to work with. I feel like I was so spoiled. I definitely developed my taste for gear and tendencies in recording there. Everyone at Tiny 

Telephone is so open to experimenting and not having a right or wrong way of doing things. 

A title like ‘Nokia Forever’ says a lot with just two words. How does early internet nostalgia and tech culture seep into the album's mood? 

N: I hate tech culture. The song is explicitly about my boyfriend’s year-long stint with a flip phone because he hated having an iPhone. Sonically, there’s some early internet references and noise stuff. It’s funny because I vividly remember how optimistic we all were when all this new tech started rolling out after the iPhone came out. It felt like something positive for the world– this new ability to connect everyone. It just doesn’t feel the same anymore because it’s designed in a much more sinister way. 

Nicole, you’ve spoken about lyrics that wrestle with the letdown of adulthood and the myth of the American dream. Is songwriting a way to process those feelings, or more of an escape from them?

N: When I write songs I try to step outside myself and view things objectively, but I also want to inflate whatever I’m writing about to a point of higher interest. It’s a way to process what I’m feeling and turn it into something tangible. I think that 

songwriting can put you in a state that feels like escapism, but it’s actually more of a confrontation. 

What do you love right now? 

O: Twin Peaks, recording music with my friends, Oblique Strategies, the way that LA cools down at night, my new microphone. 

N: floating in a body of water, recording music2, looking at crazy shit on Fragrantica, Kazumasa Hashimoto, watching plotless films 

What do you hate right now? 

O: bands that play too loud for no reason, traffic, when I run out of coffee, having to be on my phone so much, that US taxpayer dollars are funding a genocide. 

N: The privatization of everything, zionism, idiots, people caring about being perceived as “cool” 

Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you? 

O: Broken Social Scene - Feel Good Lost (2001). It’s my all timer. Amazingly creative and free, genreless. It’s infinitely inventive and refreshing. It reminds me of being a kid. 

N: Vespertine - Björk (2001). I think that album has shaped my taste in music completely. The intimacy of the recordings, the percussive elements, it’s just one of the most important records of all time. It tickles my brain. 

When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you hope sticks with them? 

O: Don’t press skip. 

N: We spend a lot of time and energy on sonic worldbuilding, but I wonder if/hope that people pay attention to the lyrics as well.