WHATMORE soundtrack the end of the world with “Last Time”

Catching up with WHATMORE the morning of member Yoshi T.’s birthday, there’s a decisive answer to how five New York musicians with wildly divergent musical tastes ended up in a band together. “The devil just came up from the ground, from the Union Square train station, and grabbed Elijah [Judah] by his ankles,” they say. “The devil also meaning, you know, friendship.”

It’s as straight an answer as you’re likely to get from Yoshi, Elijah, Cisco Swank, Jackson August, and Sebastiano. Friends since meeting at New York’s famous LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, WHATMORE have spent the past few years turning that camaraderie into a fast-rising musical project. Their self-titled debut arrived last October, followed by a COLORS performance; support for Joey Valence & Brae; and a generational festival run spanning Coachella, Governors Ball, and Lollapalooza. Reading and Leeds are next on the hit list, before they make their way to London’s The Lower Third in September.

“We all came together as our own individual artists who have their own pockets of sound,” they explain. Before the group, those pockets stretched from Yoshi’s hip-hop and R&B to Cisco’s jazzier inclinations. “WHATMORE was founded on this idea of what happens when you just take every corner and blow it together.” Their sound floats around hip-hop, alt-R&B, indie rock and pop, though trying to pin it down much further feels entirely beside the point. When asked about the less obvious shared roots of their musical education, they land on the unexpected: “Music starts and ends with The Wiggles.”

If WHATMORE’s genre-fluidity sounds meticulously engineered from the outside, their actual methodology is decidedly less precious. “Sometimes I feel like we’re all so talented that the real challenge is just piecing it together,” they say, immediately clocking the modesty of their statement. “We always have so many different ideas. It’s just how can you put the puzzle pieces together?”

That idea runs through new single “Last Time”, featuring warm bass, punchy drums, distorted guitars, and a music video cameo from the Alex Consani. During a week-long lockout at a studio in New York's Greenpoint neighbourhood, the band were doing what they usually do – making a lot of things, very quickly. “We work in quantity over quality,” they laugh. “We just like to shit out ideas, and ‘Last Time’ was one of those.” Most of the track was laid down that day, including three separate electric bass parts from Cisco; a verse arrived later, and they kept chipping away until a month before release. “It’s pretty spontaneous,” they explain. “That’s the key word for that song and a lot of songs that we make.”

On what would surround them if they could physically step inside the song, WHATMORE picture “the end of the world, but it’s a sunset”. Asteroids falling through a meteor shower at golden hour whilst they sit around with their friends, “reminiscing about life during the end times.” That world-building increasingly extends beyond the songs. Recent videos have brought everyone from Avantika and Sean Kaufman, plus Consani, into the WHATMORE cinematic universe, with the band pointing to the “visual language” of “Last Time” as one of the clearest introductions to who they are.

For now, though, they’re in no rush to turn that experimentation into album two. Instead, 2026 has been given over to a string of single releases. At first, they offer a simpler explanation. “It’s because of the money,” they deadpan. “We realised that the single model actually helps us get more money… WHATMORE 2026, we’re selling out.” Anyone with further money-making schemes, they add, should get in touch. “There’s always got to be some time to breathe,” they admit, all jokes aside. “I think this gives us some room for the second project to sound completely different from the first.”

Meanwhile, a summer ricocheting between festival stages has introduced them to a new concept: “festival music.” The strange sweet spot where somebody at the back can casually two-step whilst somebody at the front loses their mind. “Sometimes people don’t want to jump, and sometimes people want to jump,” they reason. “There’s a time and place for everything.” Turnstile have become a particular fascination. Not for their sound, which WHATMORE readily admits bears virtually no resemblance to their own, but for the sheer energy of their live sets.

Touring has opened their ears to what a song can become outside the studio. It’s also presented another problem: WHATMORE now has a WHATMORE to live up to. “The album [was] made in this vacuum,” they reflect. Starting from nothing meant there was no existing WHATMORE to measure themselves against. Now, the question is what to do with the identity they’ve already built. “When you’re going from nothing to something, it’s now your choice to maybe add on to that, or maybe go backwards.”

Perhaps the best explanation of why the whole thing works comes much earlier, buried within their story of devils emerging from Union Square. “Life is too short to do things alone,” they conclude. Since the five started the band, as WHATMORE themselves point out, the world hasn’t ended yet. “Literally, we’re saving the world.”