While struggling to figure out how exactly I wanted to preface this interview with frontman Nick Llobet of the indie rock trio youbet, I realized that the difficulty is a testament to the many facets of their music, which is undeniably challenging. The lyrics are embedded with wordplay that leads the listener down ambiguous, endless paths. The music is as strange as it is familiar, as dark as it is playful, as maddening as it is lovable. These apparent contradictions are just as reciprocal as they are independent. Understanding youbet’s music is like solving an equation with both infinite solutions and no solutions at all.
With these emotional and mental paradoxes, unconventional production decisions, nasty riffs, and eerie album art, youbet feels like pop music from an alternative universe. Yet, by rooting itself in universally shared experiences like overcoming self-doubt, finding direction, and struggle vs. satisfaction, the band shows us that this indescribable strangeness is not from an alternative universe at all but is an authentic, genuine reflection of the paradoxes and mysteries within our own universe.
Lentils: What is youbet’s origin story?
Nick: In 2004, my father took me to see Metallica in Fort Lauderdale. It was such a powerful experience. I got this overwhelming existential dread and depression after the concert. I couldn’t believe how a band gets to travel and play music like that for a living. “I don’t play music, so I’ll never get to enjoy that…” That feeling. It haunted me for days and days, and it just ate away at my soul. [Eventually] I just gave in and started playing guitar. I’d go to my friend’s house and hang out with them, but secretly, I was just there to play the hell out of their guitar. They’d be like, “You just come over to play our guitar. You don’t even want to hang out with us…” I got really good really fast, playing every single day obsessively…rock songs, classic rock, you know, just like mostly the stuff my dad would show me. He was into the big classic rock artists of the 80s, like Van Halen, Def Leppard… Elton John. Black Sabbath too. But only with Dio, not with Ozzy… I wanted to impress him, to make him proud. My dad was my muse when I was a kid.
Lentils: How long have you been hacking at this here in NYC?
Nick: Quite some time. I’ve been living here in NYC for over 10 years and grinding this whole time. I wasn’t instantly in the scene or anything like that. I was a late bloomer in every sense. Songwriting-wise, I didn’t start singing and writing songs until I was 21. [At that time] I didn’t have a lot of opinions on how the world formed. So when I moved to New York, I was just kind of a big child. I spent a few years just being really lost writing all kinds of songs, some cringe-ass music, played in a few different bands. Eventually, when I was around 25, I started to have this epiphany. I was really into Bob Dylan at this point, and I was reading his autobiography Chronicles. There’s a part of his book where he said something like, “Go and learn 100 folk songs, and you’ll be a great artist.” So I got inspired and set out on this endeavor of learning as many songs as I could…country songs, folk songs, Elliot Smith songs, songs that I felt like I could perform, learn, and absorb. I have a songbook in my house with all the lyrics of the songs written, the date when it was written, the composer, the writer, and then all the chords above the words.
By learning these songs, I started to form a template of what I wanted to achieve as a songwriter. I started to understand simplicity. I was always overcomplicating things and making them unlikable to me, and then all of a sudden, bam! I had this thing: it was like pop music but with this edge of darkness and playfulness… It was a great feeling for me to actually learn how to enjoy my creations. Imagine somebody going their whole musical life thinking that they might not have what it takes to do what they need to do. [This process] made me realize that if you work hard and try to have a vision, you can form a vision instead of thinking: do I have talent? Am I good at this? Am I as good as this person?… The vision. That’s the most important thing. Because with a vision, you can build something. Without a vision, you’re just floating around with whatever you’re given. Vision is everything. It’s more important than any skill you have. The vision is the ultimate skill. You build skills from the vision because you see what needs to be worked on. And so I did that, and I became a songwriter I liked. It changed my life.
Lentils: There’s a three-to-four-year break between their debut album, “Compare and Despair” (2020), and their latest release, “Way to Be” (2024 ). Can you speak to their relationship with one another and the differences between the making of these albums?
Nick: So I would definitely say “Way to Be” is a sequel to “Compare and Despair” because I wrote all the songs in the same era of my life, 2018-2019. Well, I wrote “Compare and Despair” in 2018 and “Way to Be” the next year while I participated in a songwriting club… … each song is from a different week. The title track of “Way to Be” was the first song I wrote for the club. Week two was “Carsick.” Week three was “Due.” Week four was…it goes on… When the pandemic came. I took a year off of writing songs. I was burnt out. During that time I learned flamenco and spent about a year editing all the songs on “Way to Be.” On “Care and Despair,” three people were producing my music. On “Way to Be” I took the lead role in all that engineering.
Lentils: My two favorite songs on the latest album are “Carsick” and “Trauma.” Tell me about those particular tracks.
Nick: When I finished “Carsick,” I thought, “Wow, I don’t know if people will like this.” It felt like the kind of song I would never write. I was really embarrassed for some reason, and I almost didn’t turn it in [to the songwriting club]. But I decided to submit this song and move on. Of course, everybody in the club loved it, and to this day, people still tell me that they like the demo version that I’ve submitted the original version more than the recording, which is how it always goes.
“Trauma” is like a Beatles-esque song or something, just like major chord vibes at times with a few fucked-up chords in there… I was in a long-term relationship for several years, and lyrically, my angle was, “What if my partner wrote a song about me and all my issues?” The song is not about my partner, as you might assume. It’s about me from my partner’s perspective, as I would think they would write it. It’s kind of a diss track on myself without anyone realizing it. It’s about codependency and being in a comfort zone and not changing your life and just being needy and all this stuff…my lyrics are wordplay. I’m not trying to say something so straightforward; it’s just snapshots of my feelings versus some straight-ahead story, folky thing. That doesn’t appeal to me all the time.
Lentils: Can you tell us a bit about flamenco?
Nick: I’ve always enjoyed flamenco. It’s just such an incredible style. It’s probably my favorite guitar style of all I’ve witnessed. It’s just otherworldly. I’m obsessed. My favorite flamenco artist is Moraíto Chico, also the Utrera sisters of the 60s; there are some cool videos of them online. Camarón de la Isla is the ultimate singer of flamenco. He plays with Paco de Lucía, another extremely influential flamenco guitarist. There are so many different rhythms and melodies and so much history and culture.
Lentils: What’s the future of youbet?
Nick: We’re going to make another record in the next year. This third album is going to be a new era, a new transformation, a new band. So those two albums are like the first stage of youbet, but this next album will be a whole evolution step, almost like starting from scratch, in a way. So I’m really excited for this new era.
Catch youbet on tour w/ Ratboys, Palehound, This is Lorelei, and Friko.
2024
November 22 – Nashville TN
November 23 – Indianapolis IN
2025
January 13 – Washington DC
January 14 – Pittsburgh PA
January 15 – Cleveland OH
January 17 – Chicago IL
January 18 – Detroit MI
January 19 – Toronto ON
January 21 – Boston MA
January 22 – Brooklyn NY
April 30 – Boise ID
May 2 – Vancouver BC
