Fred Siegel
Audio By Carbonatix
Picture this: It’s the year 2002, and you’re at Target with your mom. A song by Michelle Branch or Nelly Furtado is gently playing over the speakers. You’re surrounded by the fashion, advertising and general atmosphere of the era. The logos are all slightly different. The magazines reflect the fascinations and concerns of that exact week. Maybe the Halloween or Christmas signage is out, adding a festive layer of anticipation to the routine shopping trip.
It feels mundane in the moment, but decades later, these bits of cultural ephemera make a small part of you ache for an era when life felt simpler. That’s the kind of liminal world that After, the Los Angeles-based trip-pop band featuring Justine Dorsey and Graham Epstein, aims to build for its listeners.
“There’s some bittersweet quality to that music,” Epstein explains to the Observer. “I like capturing that weird feeling of having a memory that didn’t actually exist [and tapping] into something because you hear these specific sounds from when you were a kid. It’s just in the drums and the little ad-libs and noises and stuff that we add to our music that just kind of brings you to that realm.”
“It’s like packing in little moments in between the lyrics that make it special,” Dorsey adds. “If you listen to a Hilary Duff song or something, there’s just all these little touches and background vocals.”
These “little moments” have scratched a very specific itch for both nostalgic millennials and younger Y2K devotees. Singles like “300 dreams” and “Outbound” feel straight out of an early 2000s rom-com soundtrack, radio station or episode of Gilmore Girls from that time thanks to production that’s effervescent, airy and decidedly maximalist.
The band’s visual identity also commits to this. Their album covers, music videos, fashion and gloriously dated website all contribute to the same retrofuturistic fantasy.
The nostalgia-core creators of TikTok have predictably gravitated towards Dorsey and Epstein’s vision. Slideshows of 20-year-old photos and movie stills with captions like “POV: it’s the first week of high school in 2005, typically feature period-accurate artists ranging from Norah Jones to The All-American Rejects. These days, they’re just as likely to use After’s “Outbound.”
Dorsey and Epstein welcome this response, but also emphasize that the world they’re building doesn’t begin and end with Y2K nostalgia.
“It’s like an open-world video game, I think, that we’re creating with our music,” Dorsey says. “There are so many different biomes and worlds that you’re discovering.”
The duo originally met on Hinge in 2022 and quickly found that they had a remarkable number of things in common. They were both born on the same day in 1995. They both had an affinity for Y2K pop and rock music like Ashlee Simpson and Creed. And they both happened to be between musical projects.
Sometimes two people will meet on a dating app and realize they’re better off as friends. That kind of happened to Dorsey and Epstein, except they also decided to start a band.
“Graham had a shoegaze band and I had a solo project and we were both just, I don’t know, done,” Dorsey says. “I was kind of like, ‘I have no idea what I’m going to do with my life now.’ It felt weirdly flowy and super meant-to-be when Graham said we should start a band.”
“We started listening to Michelle Branch in the car and I was like, ‘I just want to make a band that sounds like that,’” Epstein continues. “‘Satisfying pop music on a low budget.’ So it was just perfect timing.”
After’s music is powered by more than just nostalgia. Both members have a deep knowledge of music and diverse array of influences they pull from when making their brand of “satisfying pop.”
“Before this band, I was a music snob and was really into experimental music and outsider stuff,” says Epstein. “Bringing a lot of that stuff into it is cool in, like, a tasteful way. Like, we’re not just doing the Hilary Duff thing, but also bringing in some Enigma and 90s trance elements.”
“I would argue that a lot of the pop girl stuff from that era was made by like, 40-year-old, 50-year-old men and they were also listening to Enigma,” Dorsey adds. “They were probably into the cooler stuff and you can hear those little production touches in their music too.”
The inspiration for their uncanny visuals is equally eclectic, ranging from video games and comic books to department store signage.
“For ‘Outbound,’ our last single, I was kind of inspired by Bed Bath & Beyond’s Christmas edition,” Epstein explains. “Like, this very corporate consumerism that you would pass by as a kid or something. It has this weird feeling to it. We really got into artists like Dave McKean, who did a lot of covers for Sandman.”
“It’s like corporate grunge,” Dorsey says. “There’s a lot of video game stuff but then there’s this corporate, girly mall stuff at the same time, which is kind of cool.”
While the nostalgia-starved aesthetic accounts of TikTok are luxuriating in After’s pristine pastiche of Y2K pop and soft rock, Dorsey and Epstein are already building new biomes to explore.
“I’ve been really into black metal, which is so different from Hilary [Duff]. The complete opposite,” Epstein says. “But yeah, there’s some really cool Quebecois black metal artists I’m really into that have very unique sounds and I want to somehow take those into After. […] I do want to try to make a dancey thing kind of like Kaskade.
“We’re really into a lot of ambient,” Dorsey says. “I think Graham writes really beautiful orchestral string parts, so I feel like there is space for us to do more minimal stuff.”
After EP 2, released on Oct. 17, delivers on what fans expect.
“We kind of switch genres a lot,” Epstein says. “We’re doing the straight, Hilary Duff-type of pop stuff, but we also have a heavy song on there. We experiment a lot, but it all has the same bittersweet, yearning feeling.”
As for their goal of calling to mind mundane shopping trips of yore, they’ve already succeeded in one notable way.
“We’re being played in Target,” says Epstein.
“It’s very full-circle,” Dorsey adds.
Balu Brigada, with special guests After and Harper Finn, will perform on Thursday, Nov. 13, at 8 p.m. at The Studio at The Bomb Factory, 2727 Canton St. Tickets are available starting at $39.60 on axs.com.
