Whitney/Photo: Alexa Viscius
Whitney’s “Small Talk” is a masterpiece. I spoke with Max Kakacek, a founding member and guitarist of Whitney, in advance of the record’s forthcoming release on November 7. But first, a story.
I like listening to music on trains.
When Whitney released their first album, “Light Upon the Lake” (2016), I was in transit from Zurich to nowhere, on an impossibly clean train, trying to find Italy. I was hung over and unshowered, drinking wine apathetically. I was young, imbecilic and disconnected, writing atrocious poetry and incoherent observations in a Moleskine notebook that made me feel more intelligent than I was—daydreaming about someone beautiful interrupting me and asking me what I was writing about. During this neurotic episode, a song from that record queued on my Spotify playlist—“No Woman” (now Whitney’s most recognizable song, with regular airtime on WXRT)—and I immediately felt reconnected to the breath in my body. I put down the poetry I was pretending to write, and I listened. That entire album is a transcendental piece of music. I listened from start to finish without interruption, finally allowing myself to see the landscape of white mountains and verdant, green miles passing by, feeling human and honest. That record is a captivating entry for any fan of indie music, and learning that Whitney was from Chicago created an intimate attachment to the band that has lingered in my heart for almost a decade.
Three years ago, Whitney released their third record, “Spark” (2022), an album that left fans and critics bemused and, at times, downright cruel. (Hello, Reddit.) The record was created mainly in isolation during lockdown, a period in which both Julien Ehrlich (drums and vocals) and Max Kakacek (guitar) were navigating painful breakups. The pair had grown disillusioned with their chosen instruments and felt experimentation would render inspiration. “Spark” represents a more pop-adjacent exercise by the soft-rock duo, and it’s a decent experiment. But this proposition did not sit well with many Whitney loyalists who, like me, had been so enchanted by “Light Upon the Lake” back in 2016, with its inventive blend of indie soft rock and folk backed by orchestral textures akin to micro-chamber music. “Candid” (2020) and “Forever Turned Around” (2019) are good albums, but the bar had been set so high with “Light Upon the Lake” that fans have eagerly, and perhaps impatiently, been seeking a follow-up that tickles the itch that Whitney’s first record unveiled. As Kakacek says of the “Spark” era: “We felt really boxed in by our instruments… So we completely shifted focus. In hindsight… It didn’t really capture the soulfulness of the project.”
Whitney’s “Small Talk”
Three years on from “Spark,” “Small Talk” has already generated pre-release buzz, and with good reason: It is phenomenal. Of their four studio albums, it is the clear tour de force and, upon release, could join Chicago’s canon of indie music in the same breath as Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (2002)—a profound, persistently revered and proud patch of Chicago’s soft-rock fabric. It is fast and slow at once, clocking in at thirty-six minutes and eleven songs. The opening track, “Silent Exchange,” is stunning. Beginning with meandering, isolated yet purposeful piano, Ehrlich’s gently piercing vocals enter with “Write my name / in a line of gas… bite my tongue / and they ask how I’ve been / ’cause I can’t talk / without crying again.” Kakacek’s guitar is gently introduced before a characteristic violin and horn section builds the track into something beautifully melancholic and grand. It is a mesmerizing start. “Silent Exchange” is followed, logically, by “Won’t You Speak Your Mind,” a faster track that leans on Kakacek’s guitar a bit sooner, leading into Whitney’s horn section quicker, with more capriccio. Themes of desperate, painfully disconnected communication associated with collapses of intimacy and love are clear throughout the record.
While prereleased tracks like “Damage,” “Dandelions” and “Darling”—likely the hit of the record—continue to dissect the pain of post-relationship chaos, “In the Saddle” offers a slightly psychedelic and redemptive arc to the record. It’s a song to which Julian Ehrlich’s previous work with Unknown Mortal Orchestra can clearly be connected. Thematically, “Back to the Wind” further substantiates themes of defiant hope within the album with simple poetic dexterity: “Back to the wind now feel so strong / No reflection in the glass babe I’m gone… swept in the wind turning brown / floating through the street upside down.” It’s not laureate-level prose—it’s accessible, clever and quick, and for me, it initiated an interesting meditation: Wind does not exist without that which it displaces. You cannot hear it without the rustling of trees or the buffeting of ears. You cannot see it without the leaves it carries. But there it always is, powerfully, if recklessly, forcing progress. “Back to the Wind” posits embracing the painful winds of change in a clear, hopeful way.
In the process of producing “Small Talk,” Whitney embraced first-instinct energy. “It was more like, trust your intuition immediately,” Kakacek says. “The first iteration of each song would eventually be the final product.” That openness bled into a pattern of retaining several “happy accidents.” “On ‘Islands,’ I layered a mono-synth part four times live—some notes were ‘wrong,’ but the tension felt desperate and sad,” Kakacek says. “We tried to redo it once and stopped immediately. Whatever happened that night wasn’t repeatable.” The approach also felt cyclical for the band, a return to the group’s roots. “It felt like we were coming back to a home base… letting the weird nuances of being a little naive in our recording process be a part of the songs again [as they were in 2016].”
Whitney/Photo: Alexa Viscius
Kakacek grew up in North Center, and the band’s life is rooted in Chicago. He and Ehrlich have lived together on and off for more than a decade. They are currently roommates in an apartment in Ukrainian Village, near the Inner Town Pub and Rainbo Club (an establishment Kakecek has frequented since he was using a fake ID). The record was largely recorded in that apartment. “About half the album was made at home,” Kakacek says. “All the strings, trumpets and most overdubs were in our Ukrainian Village spot; drums were in a barn in Oregon, but we mixed it in Chicago.” Given the length of their partnership, I ask Kakacek how his friendship with Ehrlich has persisted through so many intimate and at times challenging years. “We don’t really get into disagreements; sometimes we just push each other creatively,” Kakacek responds. “Our manager says we ‘speak without talking’—and that’s how it feels when we’re making songs. A lot of the time, if we’re with other people, we won’t say shit to each other, because we live together and sometimes need a break… but also because we can communicate nonverbally.”
Kakacek delicately draws comparisons between Chicago and L.A.’s industry-forward music logic when citing our city’s vibrant, consistently excellent and even incomparable music scene. “There’s a workhorse mentality here—everyone’s really fucking good at their instruments, and people take pride in that,” Kakacek says. “In other cities—not to be competitive or dismissive—but in L.A., the scene can feel fractured or built to network and posture. In Chicago, people show up for each other without asking about marketability.”
Whitney will celebrate close to home before the album drops, playing the Empty Bottle on November 2—a short walk from their place, fittingly intimate for a pair of homegrown indie heroes.
Ultimately, “Small Talk” harkens back to what “Light Upon the Lake” accomplished so powerfully, but with more maturity. The rhythmic integration of horns and strings has returned, deftly combining playful naïveté and painful lived memory with, naturally, more polish. Sonically, the album feels like a Chicago autumn. It is sad and slow, but the lingering warmth of a wonderful summer persists, fortifying melancholic meditations with hope. During our conversation, Kakacek and I discuss the quotidian nature of crises as we get older. With age, small talk begins to feature a greater weight and seriousness, yet still maintains a casual and plainspoken function with surface-level social intent. With more years and more pain, we speak to each other about breakups and dead parents with candor and in passing, even though the gravity of those topics does not falter. Conceptually, that is the theme of “Small Talk”: it is a musical essay on the crushing banality of big things.
Published in the print edition of the November 2025 issue, with the headline “Big Things: Whitney Makes A ‘Small Talk’ Masterpiece.”
