The Naked and Famous have always had a misleading name. At this point it’s just Alisa Xayalith and Thom Powers, the duo who survived the revolving door of members, industry churn, and whatever psychological toll comes with running a band for more than a decade. They’re still not particularly naked or famous, but they’ve got a new record, Recover, which does exactly what the title threatens: try to piece together what’s left of a career after the chaos.
“This band was always a duo at its core,” Thom said. “We started in 2006, just the two of us making EPs. The five-piece lineup was great, but that was about personalities as much as sound. When people left, it hit us personally more than musically. It felt like losing friends, like the end of an era.” Alisa doesn’t sugarcoat the weight of it either: “Being in a band is one of the hardest things to maintain. Sometimes I look back and wonder how we even got through it.”
Recover was born out of trial and error, and also a hard reset. Thom admits he almost pulled the plug. “I listened back to our demos and thought, ‘These aren’t enough. They sound like offcuts.’ I told Alisa if this was going to be another Simple Forms, I didn’t want to make it at all.” The solution was co-writers—friends, strangers, anyone to inject new energy. One session cracked the code when Alisa walked into a room, coffee in hand, and blurted out a chorus. “She just stormed in and sang Recover out of nowhere,” Thom recalled. “We jumped on piano and guitar immediately. That was the turning point.”
Lyrically, Recover is part therapy session, part survival manual. Alisa drew from the absence of her mother: “There are so many milestones I wish I had her for. That grief is something you can’t outsource. At the end of the day, you’re the only one who can pull yourself back together.”
Death pops up a lot too, but not always in the way you’d expect. There’s a song literally titled “Death” that turns out to be a love song. Another track, “Anesthetic,” recounts Thom’s glamorous brush with septic poisoning after food poisoning almost killed him. “One in three cases of sepsis ends in death,” he said matter-of-factly, as if recounting a bad gig. Alisa pushed him to write about it: “Tom, you’ve never written about your near-death experience. That’s crazy. Write it.”
But there’s lightness too. The single “Sunseeker” is literally about a dog—Ginger, the sun-worshipping pup belonging to Alisa’s boyfriend. “She’s in every writing session,” Alisa said. “One morning I looked outside and she was just sitting in a patch of sun. I called her my little Sunseeker. That’s where it came from.”
Even the song titles are winks. “Come As You Are”? Yes, Nirvana had that first, but Thom points out Killing Joke did too. “If people think of us and then think of Killing Joke, that’s cool. We’ve always liked referencing the artists who inspired us. Our band name itself comes from a Tricky lyric.”
The irony is that 2020 also marked the tenth anniversary of their debut Passive Me, Aggressive You, the album that made them look like overnight stars. “I feel nostalgic and sad that I wasn’t able to take it in more,” Alisa said. “We were on the cusp of internet culture swallowing music. We experienced both CD sales and the streaming takeover. I wish I had focused my energy better back then, but I feel grateful. That record changed our lives.”
Which is the throughline: surviving. Surviving members leaving, nearly dying of sepsis, surviving grief, surviving a decade in the industry. Recover isn’t the sound of victory. It’s the sound of two people still here, still writing, still trying to outsmart clichés. Which, frankly, is harder than death.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
