Mackeeper wants their pop music playing in Walgreens

Nick Harwood and Miles Cohen are raring to play me a song.

It’s a cloudy September day and the two brothers who make up the rising pop-rock project Mackeeper are leaning forward on a couch on The FADER office’s balcony. Harwood whips out his phone and presses play on one of the duo’s earliest cuts. What comes out sounds like 2010s Jeremih-meets-2010s Bieber: Auto-Tuned falsettos over a trap beat and janky piano chords. “Would you throw a grenade / To see if I bleed?” goes its snappy choral refrain.

“We want to be able to earn the ability to put out a song like this,” Harwood says. I ask him to clarify what a “song like this” means. He pauses. “Walgreens.”

The nod to the ubiquity of drug store music is a bit of a surprise. Mackeeper’s explicit aspiration towards being in the mega-mainstream feels relatively rare in an era defined by microscenes and aesthetic niches. To listeners, it may also be surprising: their music bristles with a wild, trickster energy.

Their coming debut album Believe You Me (out October 16 via In Real Life Music) circles a sound that is part radio-rock and genre-bendy pop. Just a year out from releasing their debut single “Oh Canada” they’ve already established themselves as a buzzy New York City act straddling the line between the City’s genre-ambivalent scene, with an eye towards something larger.

“I was one of those kids, and I think Miles too, that signed a contract when I was 2 years old that said I'm gonna make meaning of myself and my life through pop culture, forever,” Harwood tells me. He tends to tilt his head down while speaking, his gaze trained ahead like he’s exploding something with his mind. Cohen, on the other hand, is wily, constantly moving and darting his steely blue eyes.

Harwood, 35, is six years older than Cohen. The brothers grew up in the DC suburbs of Maryland, the children of fine artists who worked in advertising. From early on, music — specifically uber-popular pop music — is what energized them. They cite the series Now That's What I Call Music! which compiled top radio hits on CDs as an early fixation. When coming into tweenhood, Harwood got Audacity and then Fruity Loops: “I was the white boy who made beats. That was my archetype.”

When Cohen was four years old, Harwood made a fake “In Da Club”-style beat and recorded a barely post-toddler Cohen over it. “I think my name was DJ White Shadow,” Harwood recalls of his childhood producer days.

Those early expereinces sparked something in a young Cohen. When he was a bit older, he began to teach himself Fruity Loops, “recreating, [with] no twist,” early Kanye beats like “Drive Slow” and “Gone.” When Cohen was in high school, his friend taught him guitar and he joined some local rock bands. Meanwhile, though, he began making his own solo music on Ableton, but he never released the “thousands” of songs he made. “I always knew that I would have a band one day of my own, where I'm the singer and I'm writing all the songs,” says Cohen. “It just didn't happen for a while.”

When Cohen was a teenager, Harwood was beginning a career in Los Angeles as a successful music video director. “I wanted to be as close as I can to the volcano of creativity,” he says. During that time he directed zeitgeisty music videos including SOPHIE’s “It’s Okay To Cry,” “Ponyboy,” “Faceshopping,” Charli xcx and Rina Sawayama’s “Beg For You,” and multiple visual collaborations with Blood Orange and Porches. But despite the big name credits, he describes the late 2010s-into-COVID-period of his career as “wasting away on Calypso’s island.”

“Making music videos is not a career,” Harwood says. “You can become a creative director and barely eke out a living doing that.” He says his turn towards music felt like a “have to” situation. “I have something to say, and I unfortunately love music so much that there's nothing else I can do.” Meanwhile, Cohen was living in Philadelphia, working at a falafel restaurant, “not thinking about any career or future.” With no plan or timeline, he still had a sense that “music's just gonna happen because I believe in myself,” he tells me. As COVID took hold and work dried up, Harwood locked in on music and re-connected creatively with his brother as Mackeeper.

They recorded much of their debut EP Rock Candy on their childhood home’s back porch in Maryland. It features their early breakout hit “Pieces Of You,” a boom-snap sea shanty which centers Cohen’s impressive upper range. The songs are direct, dense, and ear-wormy. “They’re not songs that develop,”Harwood says, stone cold and serious. “They don’t have scale or scope. That’s what makes them feel great. Precious little sushis, independently.”

The EP got love on social media from Dev Hynes and Lorde, who shared the song on her Instagram story. (She found it through Hynes's own social media). The major looks, so early in their career, could make them seem like “industry plants;" the term is, ironically, Harwood’s username on Instagram. Plus, he does have deep, enduring creative relationships in the industry from his years as a music video director. But clout among major artists isn’t their goal. “We’re not trying to reach professional, amazing artists that we respect,” Harwood says. “We're trying to reach real human people.”

On an internet overrun by streamers, bot farms, and hoards of influencer-musicians, a story-share from a celebrity isn’t enough to break through. With that, the tone Mackeeper has with me is far more obstinate and dogged than it is entitled. The popstars-to-be are eager to prove that they’re legit and to properly launch their music career. “You feel like you're in a Moroccan souk,’" Harwood says about selling and promoting their forthcoming debut album, fittingly titled Believe You Me. The title is part-challenge, part-command to believe the boys when they tell you that they’re superstars.

Half of the album was written and recorded in an Airbnb in Livingston Manor in Upstate New York, before the duo tinkered on production for months and later re-recorded certain tracks in Virginia. They describe the new album, 13 tracks of musical flexes made for the pure fuck-it-rush of it all, as akin to when they were kids and would cry out “mommy, look!” Both Rock Candy and this album were finished before they’d released any music, so their confident pop sound and stylings were all fashioned “without proof of anything working,” Cohen says.

You can hear that churlish and pugnacious spirit on album single “Holy Moses,” a drifty bit of cowboy rock. Its lyrics nod to their full-tilt moxy to make it: “Show me the dotted line / I got a tiny box with a diamond inside,” goes its rapped and heavily distorted verse. On tracks like “All City,” the brothers let the bars flow freely over atonal guitar (“Playing hopscotch on a landmine”). And on songs like “Soccer Ball,” they lean into guitar twang and Alex G-style folks instrumentation. It's the softer side of a duo whose music is heavy on braggadocio.

“I'm not an insane singer, but I just sing this with a bratty confidence, then we can get any message across. You can convince anyone of anything,” says Cohen. That includes themselves: “It’s self-hypnosis,” Cohen adds. After hearing their earnestly written, mischievously delivered guitar pop, I believe them, too.