The Lemon Twigs sound like your favorite ‘60s band. They’re fine with that

By Gabe Friedman

How do the Lemon Twigs dress on a random spring afternoon in Brooklyn? It might sound superficial, but it’s this reporter’s first question.

For almost a decade — starting in their teens — brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario have released a string of albums saturated in classic rock influences. Their fifth album under the Lemon Twigs name, “A Dream Is All We Know,” which is out Friday, is their strongest yet, distilling their nods to acts like The Byrds, Big Star, the Beach Boys and Todd Rundgren into a compelling power pop cocktail.

What they wear for a casual interview without a photoshoot could lend some insight: Do they live and breathe the 1960s and ‘70s, the way their music does? Or is the project more an exercise in meticulous musical nerdom?

The answer is instantly clear: It’s both. Meeting in East Williamsburg’s Cooper Park, not far from their rehearsal and recording studio, Brian sports a tan corduroy jacket and a bright red shoulder bag; Michael wears a gray checkered tweed jacket. Both have long dark hair with bangs and both wear very tight jeans. When asked about their love of Big Star frontman Alex Chilton, Michael whips out a biography about the man, “A Man Called Destruction,” from his bag.

“We got into this vintage clothes game a while ago and it’s too late to turn back now,” says Brian, who is 27 (Michael is two years younger). “Somebody yelled out the [car] window at me the other day ‘Get a haircut!’ And I thought, ‘Am I in the 1960s?’”

It’s easy to dismiss the Lemon Twigs — who are indeed as twig-thin as Mick Jagger, and shorter to boot — as a facile pastiche of their influences. But that’s likely a barb thrown by surface-level listeners who haven’t deeply engaged with the brothers’ songwriting — which is rich and complex, full of meandering melodies, chord changes and string arrangements. Their straightforward and honest lyrics ruminate on big familiar themes: love, anxiety and the passage of time (see for instance their recent single “My Golden Years,” which makes the brothers sound older than their years).

In a unique feat for 2024, they also now record everything to tape in their North Brooklyn studio space, which can’t be much more than 100 square feet and is packed with vintage equipment — from a true plate reverb machine (as opposed to a modern guitar pedal) to a recording console that looks like it has seen its share of late night sessions. The retro gadgets make a big difference, giving the sound of “A Dream Is All We Know” a genuinely analog feel.

A lot of contemporary music sounds “like this, you know?” Michael says, pressing his two hands together. “It sounds small.”

Their previous album, last year’s “Everything Harmony,” garnered strong reviews, earning the duo a growing crescendo of press and attention. It culminated in an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” which they punctuated with some old-school leg kicks.

Some past albums have adhered to a theme, musically or lyrically — such as 2018’s “Go To School,” about a chimp attending a human school — but the new record showcases the brothers loosening their grip on motif. And while listeners of any age might recognize the sounds of several of their favorite ‘60s and ‘70s groups in any given song, Brian and Michael also seem at peace with that.

“I never cared about that to a fault,” Michael says about the numerous comparisons they get to bands of yesteryear. “This time around, we loosened up in the sense that [the music] just wasn’t so precious and serious. The last record feels a little serious.”

The youth of their fanbase is a testament to the wave of ‘60s music and style appreciation that continues to resurface every few years — including most recently on TikTok. Patrick Nitti — a 24-year-old music publicist who loves groups like the Beach Boys and Crosby, Stills and Nash (along with the Lemon Twigs) — pointed to the #bellboy trend on the platform that peaked last year. (Searching that hashtag on TikTok still brings up an endless stream of videos of very young men of all stripes showing off their — probably thrifted — bell bottoms.)

“They do an old school style of power pop, but they’re reaching a new audience that doesn’t associate it with old school or nostalgia at all,” says Rob Sheffield, the longtime Rolling Stone writer and author of “Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World.” “This has nothing to do with nostalgia — that would be like saying that electric microphones are nostalgia. Electric microphones are an old invention.”

A machine the Beatles built
Despite their sunny California sound, the D’Addarios are New York boys. They grew up on Long Island — in Hicksville, to be exact, which also produced Billy Joel — and their father Ronnie was a power pop artist in his own right who released similar-sounding Beatles-tinged tunes in the ‘70s.

The brothers got into showbiz as child actors: Brian did Broadway musicals, including “Les Miserables” and “The Little Mermaid,” and Michael did TV and film in addition to theater. His credits range from a production of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” to Ice Cube’s sitcom “Are We There Yet?”

Michael lives on the Upper West Side; Brian lives in Windsor Terrace, just under the southern edge of Park Slope, and the band plays regularly in Brooklyn. On paper, they might seem like fish out of water in the contemporary rock and pop scene, but the brothers push back on that. They point to other groups like Tchotchke (which both of their girlfriends play in), Josephine Network and Brower, arguing that no matter the decade, there are always bands in New York inspired by rock ’n’ roll’s heyday. (Geese is another rising Brooklyn band with retro rock undertones.)

“They’re inspired by what they’re inspired by, and it comes out in their music, and it’s not really following a current trend,” Brian says about his classic rock-inspired peers. “They all kind of have that [classic rock] flavor, but… the bands are very different.”

Fan Cody Weinberger, a 30-year-old biochemist who also lives in Windsor Terrace, likes other new takes on the classic rock prototype, like Foxygen and Brooklyn-based troubadour Cut Worms. He says the Lemon Twigs are in a similar category but have staked out a unique place in the indie subgenre on the strength of their songwriting.

“They’re very reminiscent of a lot of the ‘60s styles I like, but not copycat,” Weinberger says.

“It’s a machine that [the Beatles] built, and it’s a good machine, and the Lemon Twigs are writing new songs with it,” Sheffield adds.

Image is a big part of differentiating oneself in the current crowded ecosystem, and the Lemon Twigs are very hands on in that department, artistically directing their photo shoots and music videos. From blazers to striped sweaters to yes, bell bottoms, they have the ‘60s-through-’80s aesthetic down.

As we wrap our interview, it’s starting to drizzle in Cooper Park. Michael eyes the skies warily. “I’m wearing cashmere,” he says. “I don’t want to fuck it up!”

“A Dream Is All We Know” is out on 3 May on Captured Tracks