youbet at Rubies on Five Points
The best teachers never stop learning. They listen closely, stay curious, and let what they discover shape how they guide others. On their new self-titled album as youbet (due May 1st 2026, via Hardly Art), longtime music educators Nick Llobet (he/they) and Micah Prussack (she/her) proudly act as both explorer and guide, sharing three-dimensional musical sculptures so confidently and esoterically their own that they couldn’t have been released under any other name but youbet. Created in motion and shaped between long stretches of touring, the album reflects a moment of ecstatic possibility and grit. Both sharpened and expansive, youbet grows from the confines of home recording and “bedroom pop” into something sturdier, louder, and unmistakably their own.
“I myself am a constant student of life, of creating,” Llobet says. “I see people's creative anxieties because I have lived them. It’s very therapeutic because I can tell that I'm giving people strong advice based on all my failures.” Llobet relocated to New York from Denver in 2013 and forged initial connections in the local scene, while creating youbet and writing two albums, but it wasn’t until meeting Prussack in 2022 that they discovered a different level of musical connection. When the duo started playing together, they quickly realized their uniquely shared musical language and eagerness to learn from everything, connecting over a vast array of musical influence and their own practice of teaching. “Early in our friendship, Nick and I were playing guitar in the park and we decided that the Beatles were so good because they learned how to play hundreds of songs together,” Prussack says. “So we began our quest to learn 1,000 songs. Nick started compiling a massive playlist called ‘Learn Me’ filled with music that we habitually study and generate new ideas from.”
The duo began experimenting musically, and their subsequent year of touring led to a new, more refined sound. “We had a huge opportunity for reinvention,” Prussack says. “Nick will never play the chord that you expect, and is always pushing me outside of my creative box. Their compositions are so exciting to explore, and on tour we began to reconsider and transform the kernel of each song to match our new environment.”
That depth of surprise and expansive warmth radiates from album opener “Ground Kiss”, a late-night existential query written when Llobet found themselves adjusting to living alone after the end of an 11-year relationship. “The song represents an endless search for that something and the rebuilding that goes along with trial and failure,” they say. The song unites the spectrum between clouds of plucked Big Thief-esque glow and bursts of distorted frustration. To that end, youbet demonstrates Llobet and Prussack’s ability to weave beguiling musical and lyrical expression, pushing and pulling at the resulting mesh.
Developing their finely tuned fusion between complex musicality and deeply felt emotion required more than hoping inspiration would strike. Instead, the process of creating youbet involved countless hours of precise engineering, meticulous craft, and gritty dedication. The duo were consistently listening, learning, and writing. But that hard work boils down into every facet of their work, including bringing a set of dumbbells on tour so they could keep active and stay disciplined. For their part, Llobet sees the resulting album as a statement of that hard work and the opening of a new chapter. “It’s the beginning of a new era for youbet,” they say. “The band
started as a sort of bedroom project for myself, but it has transformed into something expansive since working with Micah. It’s like we’re running a family business.”
The broiling “Undefined” draws from that personal soul-searching, a musical mosaic of life before and after a complicated breakup. Llobet first worked out the verses while waiting for a guitar student, a fitting backdrop for the song's balance of wizardly art pop experimentalism and diligent power pop hookiness. Co-producers Katie Von Schleicher and Julian Fader help round out the mix, the former adding synth glisten and the latter a drum backbone hammered into place by Prussack’s bass.
The concussive “See Thru” rushes headlong through heavy alt rock chop, moments of gentler curve, and even bubbly electronics—a track Llobet notes began when they were toying with a Debussy piano part on guitar and then stamped in the harmonics and energy of Japanese hard rock band Boris. Elsewhere, “Receive” finds Llobet carving away at generational conflict, tethering propulsive bursts of guitar reverie with raw emotional vigor in the vein of Pile. “On the verse, the bass is playing variations on the vocal melody,” Prussack says. “Throughout the album, there’s unique interplay and variation that you can only get from a lot of hard work together.”
Echoing their strengths as educators, the ability to voraciously learn from a breadth of influences informs youbet—from the dizzying score to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to dazzling flamenco—but their ability to recognize meaning beyond signposts and find connections to emotional experience pushes everything into a topographical realism. “Having respect for the canon doesn’t mean we’re ever limited by revivalism. There’s a whole universe of musical vocabulary that we can borrow from and translate into our language,” Prussack says.
That willingness to learn from the past while building the future is something tied deeply to the band’s New York City roots, with so many visionary artists having previously built new worlds within the city’s confines. “For years, I was too intimidated to step into the scene. It’s been such a breath of fresh air to build this new craft, this new philosophy of songwriting in a scene I respect and feel in community with,” says Llobet.
Compelling art requires an unimaginable burst of new life, a shift from two-dimensional ideas to viscous, sinewy reality. As much as the hard work bolsters the music, it’s truly the resounding spirit of Llobet and Prussack’s relationship at the core of youbet. “Micah has brought a lot of order to my chaotic neurodivergence,” Llobet reflects. “I consider her my musical confidant. She can be cleverly critical and extremely encouraging. She's probably the most opinionated person I know. Together we build this musical balance.” What emerges is an album that doesn’t just break free of its former constraints, but reconfigures them into something sturdier: a collaborative language capable of holding contradiction, growth, and connection all at once.
