Culture Cabinet

By the time Worthitpurchase released their debut in 2020, Omar Akrouche and Nicole Rowe had already been circling each other creatively for years. “Our background as an artist is confusing, even unto ourselves,” Akrouche says in an interview with Culture Cabinet. “We’ve been in a band, in a way, shape, or form together since 2015, and have changed names and forms and goals many times. But we’ve always been writing songs and working together.”

That winding road that spans nearly a decade has led them to now, with the release of their third album, Worthitpurchase, out October 3. “In a way, Worthitpurchase is older than it seems,” says Akrouche. “Even though this is our third record, the self-titled feels like a fresh start.”

That fresh start is part of what led them to leave the record self-titled. For Rowe, no single phrase seemed to capture what they were trying to do. “No name that we came up with felt like it really made sense or stuck,” she explains. “The record feels like a new direction for us. It’s not tied to one theme, and in a lot of ways, the album art is the title. But really, it’s a statement: this is how we want to portray ourselves moving forward.”

If the record represents a new beginning, it also reflects the many evolutions Worthitpurchase has already undergone. The band started as a duo, expanded into larger configurations, and sometimes returned to its bare-bones core. “The band has always been very anchored on being a duo,” Akrouche says. “We played live as a duo even before we had put out a record. But when it came time post-COVID actually try to play more shows, I felt a little frustrated because we were in the studio very literate and capable, but you only have four hands on stage as a duo. There were a lot of things we wanted to do that we weren’t able to do.”

At first, the duo leaned into the contrast between their recordings and their shows. “We were just hardcore embracing the difference between the record and the live show and just really allowing them to be different, and like, celebrating that,” Akrouche recalls. But soon, they wanted more. “At a certain point we were like, we don’t want people to think that we’re like, a folk band or something,” he says. “So we just set up a band and played as a band. And then we kind of went from a duo to a trio to a four-piece, and then we were like, ‘What happens if we have like, five of our friends on stage?’ Our last couple of shows were a six-piece band, which was awesome, but also its own bag of worms to manage.”

Rowe adds that while the expanded lineup was rewarding, it was also logistically difficult. “We ask a lot of our friends who are also working as producers or session musicians to play live with us, because they’re kind of like the best translators of the different parts of our music. But it’s really hard to rely on them, because a lot of them are on tour or already booked and busy. So I feel like we’re kind of, in a way, right now going back to figuring out how to make a duo work and be strong in that as a live presence. As nice as it is to have a full band, it’s always kind of just like, people are around, that’s great, but if they’re not, we need to be strong as well, just the both of us.”

That tension between fluidity and stability runs through their new record. Rather than writing in quick bursts, they pieced this collection together over years, revisiting old recordings and finishing newer songs that felt ready to live alongside them. “We’re a little old school in the sense that we really prioritize the record,” Akrouche explains. “We’ve thought historically of things as this record, that record, the next record, and just allowing certain songs and certain sounds and ideas to accumulate and identify themselves as what’s going to happen next.”

Rowe describes it as a more deliberate process than in the past. “We had so many songs that we were already sitting on: songs Omar had started, songs I had, and songs we were both writing. That’s why some of the songs might be four years old, and then some of them were finished last fall. We kind of just collected all of the music we were working on and said, ‘Okay, here’s the old stuff we want to put out that feels like it fits within this record, and here’s the new stuff we’re excited to put out alongside it.’ In the past we might write ten songs in four months, record them, and release them, and they’d just happen to make sense together. This time it was definitely more picking and choosing.”

Even with a brand-new record out in the world, the duo are already thinking about what comes next. “It feels exciting to just make tunes,” Akrouche says. “For so long we wished we were on a label, because when you’re younger you just want to tour and be signed, no matter what the contract is. That didn’t work out for us at the time. But now we’re here, we have a dope studio, and we can record and release whenever we want. We don’t have to sit on another album for years. We can just put out a song when we feel like it.”

Rowe nods at the idea, though she still has one eye on the road. “I’d love to go on a short tour next year,” she says. Akrouche quickly jumps in: “We do have to tour this album a little bit.”

Their self-titled album stands as both a culmination of their past and a doorway to their next phase. It’s a project shaped by contradictions: meticulous yet playful, rooted in collaboration yet unafraid of solitude, reflective of their history but restless to move forward. More than anything, it captures the feeling that Worthitpurchase is finally free to define themselves on their own terms.

Worthitpurchase is out October 3.