fantasy of a broken heart. Photo by Eve Aplert
The Opener is The FADER’s short-form profile series of casual conversations with exciting new artists.
Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz will probably never finish One Piece. The two musicians, who form the indie prog-pop band fantasy of a broken heart, started watching the beloved and notoriously lengthy anime during the first COVID quarantine. They’re about 300 episodes in, with roughly 800 to go, but they’re energized by the principles they share with the show. “I feel like there aren’t many mainstream forms of media that value friendship and teamwork,” Nardo tells me from a video call, “and hold them on a pedestal as highly as romantic love.” Wollowitz agrees enthusiastically. “Al and I function on a bullish mentality where everyone goes, ‘We can do it!’ And then the music starts playing, and everyone starts flying.”
Watching One Piece during lockdown was like “watching a band on tour,” Nardo tells me, providing the pair with some much-needed escape to an important, and then-prohibited, part of their lives: performing music live, for weeks or months at a time. By their own account, the pair have traversed the country “dozens” of times together as bandmates. Nardo arrived in Brooklyn in 2016 from Los Angeles, and Wollowitz moved to the borough in 2017 from the New York suburbs; soon after meeting at the since-closed Bushwick venue Heck, the pair became a key feature of the city’s underground pop movement.
feats of engineering, fantasy’s debut album (out September 27 via Dots Per Inch), packs a prog-rock epic’s bombast into a humble bedroom-pop package, each abrupt structural shift and layer of flaring sonic fantasia guided by a strong sense of play. A shared love for Yes and King Crimson guide them philosophically, if not precisely sonically. Those bands, Wollowitz explains, are “both obsessed with making really insane-sounding stuff, whether the arrangement or the musical palette itself is busted open.” The popular success of these groups formed fantasy’s mandate, he says: “None of it is inaccessible.”
Each song on feats demonstrates a deep, swooning sophistication, experimenting with form while remaining committed to accessibility. Singles like “Ur Heart Stops” and “Loss” alternately skip and shred along with a jauntiness reminiscent of Destroyer’s Kaputt, while “AFV” dusts off the cathartic indie rock developed by New York rock bands around the turn of the millennium. The album’s exploration of the duo’s personal and creative relationships is most intimately explored on its title track: the absurdities of touring, and how city infrastructure can affect creative communities are wrapped up in an ornate and unabashedly theatrical package.
The unique biome of feats was informed by playing in the plasma pool of other touring bands. Both Nardo and Wollowitz play in the live lineups for Nate Amos and Rachel Brown’s Water From Your Eyes and Amos’s solo project This Is Lorelei (Amos has returned the favor, performing drums in the live iteration of fantasy, which also includes fellow Brooklyn pop act Margeaux on bass duties). The duo first performed together in 2017, joining the punk band Animal House’s lineup for their tour in support of Sloppy Jane’s 2021 album Madison.
fantasy is an opportunity for its creators to push past their comfort zones into uncharted waters. “I prefer playing other people’s music [to] my own,” Wollowitz admits. “We’ve made our careers out of being reliable for others, [and] now we have to be reliable for ourselves. As people, that’s the hardest thing anyone has to do, right?”
feats of engineering is an album that carries the lingering warmth of long-closed performance spaces. The music is inspired by the anything-goes ethos of The Glove, a community venue known for its jarring, dissonant gigs where genuine magic could come from the collision. The venue shuttered during COVID, and fantasy decamped to Los Angeles for a year before returning to N.Y.C. Wollowitz says he wrote the chords to “AFV” — a song set on the subway — the night The Glove closed for good, and that the remainder of the album’s arc formed during their subsequent “circle around the country.”
For now, fantasy of a broken heart are sticking with New York as they figure out all the things that come with a budding indie rock career. Like TikTok. How do they decide which section of each song to submit to the platform’s sound library, if each song changes drastically three or four times before it ends? While most artists would grumble, fantasy are unflappably optimistic. There’s that One Piece mentality again: “It’s not the end of the world to me if I never conquer TikTok,” Wollowitz says, “but it would be the end of the world for our label, so we’ll figure it out.” Cue the music and the flying; roll credits.
