The White Stripes have a song called "Little Room." Released in 2001, the 50-second ditty is quite literally an ode to the cramped quarters that fledgling musicians endure when they're first stoking their creative mojo — and why those intimate spaces are often-times more conducive to grand ideas than sprawling, big-budget practice pads.
Taipei Houston are in their own little room when they make contact with Revolver. The two musicians, Layne and Myles Ulrich, are squished in front of a webcam that's framing them from the chest up, while the majority of the room behind them is packed with music gear. No wall art or homely amenities; just musical equipment resting casually against the bare walls, like it was dropped there after being lugged back from a late-night gig.
Like the White Stripes, Taipei Houston are a two-piece garage-rock band helmed by people with the same last name. But that's where the parallels end. Unlike Jack and Meg White, the Ulrichs are actual siblings. And the surname bassist-vocalist Layne, 21, and drummer Myles, 24, share happens to be the same as a certain world-renowned metal drummer (more on that later). But first and foremost, as brothers, friends and musical co-conspirators, they have an impressively healthy and productive bond.
They've lived together almost their entire lives, including now, at their East Los Angeles apartment. Back in 2020, during the start of the pandemic, they found themselves cooped up in their home city of San Francisco. And instead of getting at each other's throats, they figured they'd form a band. "It definitely feels like we're almost telepathic at this point," Myles says of their relationship. "There's an older brother and a younger brother [dynamic]," Layne adds. "We always had this partnership."
Last fall, their creative telepathy materialized in the form of Taipei Houston's debut album, Once Bit Never Bored, a 30-minute surge of sweaty, white-knuckle rawk & roll that channels the desert-rock oomph of Fu Manchu and the hooky fizz of the Strokes in equal measure. The Ulrichs wrote, performed and produced the entire LP themselves — a totally new experience for the brothers, since Taipei Houston is their first real band. However, nothing about the record rings amateurish. Rock is in their blood, after all.
Which brings us back to the Metallica-sized elephant in the room. Myles and Layne's dad is, of course, Lars Ulrich, co-founder of the biggest metal band of all time. However, despite coming up in the household of a thrash-metal pioneer, the heaviest music either of them connected with as youths was Black Sabbath and AC/DC. Growing up in the 2000s amid the inescapable garage-rock revival, their favorite bands are the Strokes and Arctic Monkeys.
Unlike Metallica frontman James Hetfield's son Castor and bassist Robert Trujillo's son Tye, who've also kick-started bands of their own in recent years, the Ulrich boys didn't spend much time backstage at Metallica shows in their youth — or if they did, it's not something they're interested in discussing during a conversation about Taipei Houston. When their dad comes up in relation to their band, they make it abundantly clear that riding his coattails has never been their motive. In fact, Myles asserts that he and his brother grew up pretty well insulated from the grand spectacle of Metallica.
"We stayed in the suburbs just being kids and just listening to music on our own, doing our own thing," he says. "My dream is for Taipei Houston to be completely its own thing that has nothing to do with any of that."
They're not openly defying expectations based on their family history; they're simply making the music they want to hear. That said, rebellion is a major motivating factor for Taipei Houston. Their sound is raw and organic, and the inertia in their delivery is a welcomed kick in the ass during an era when the broader guitar zeitgeist is dominated by the lackadaisical strums of Steve Lacy and the sanitized pop-punk mews of Machine Gun Kelly. Taipei Houston use the word "perpendicular" to describe their musical approach on Once Bit Never Bored — as in the opposite of a rock norm that's passive and snoozy to their ears.
"I think there's a general feeling of sameness nowadays," says Myles. "The way social media and our world works, we're very much entertained at every second and lullabied into a certain way of feeling all the time … I think that rock music — specifically music that feels energetic or feels intense — is such a [counter] to that. The point of Taipei, rather than being really heavy or something, is to make something that's surprising and grabs your attention."
On Once Bit Never Bored, Taipei Houston succeed in that way by making the ruckus feel genuine. Myles' mission statement doesn't read all that differently from the subtext of ham-fisted retro rockers like Greta Van Fleet and Måneskin, whose schtick centers on parroting vintage rock tropes like historical reenactors. But Taipei Houston aren't trying to evoke a romanticized past or pander to people's nostalgic instincts. They consider themselves distinctly modernist artists.
"When we were making our first record, I was very much like, 'Fuck 2021, fuck Instagram, fuck TikTok. I wish it was the early Seventies or the early Nineties,'" Myles explains. "Now what I've come to realize is that all the best bands that we loved from those times hated everything that was going on then and made rebellious music for that time."
Today, he and Layne have a new philosophy — one that grounds them in the "now" of their little room, where they're unaffected by outside forces and free to follow their muse. "Find a way to exist now instead of being escapist, like, 'Oh, I wish it was 40 years ago because that was so much cooler,'" Myles concludes. "Find a way to rebel against the day you're in."
