Ray Bull

with Babehoven That question has been the engine behind one of the internet’s most fascinating indie breakthroughs. Is it one guy? Two? A viral account spiraling into a music project? Ray Bull has spent their existence purposefully blurring these lines. They are artists and they are musicians; they are deeply serious and terminally online; they are a pop group and an art project. With their new album, Please Stop Laughing, they finally offer an answer to the question of who they are, mostly by further obfuscating it. Aaron Graham and Tucker Elkins make up Ray Bull, but they function less like a traditional band and more like a continuous, living feedback loop. They met while in college at Cooper Union, not as musicians, but as visual artists. Graham focused on images, Elkins on film. When they reconnected years later at a gallery show in Brooklyn, they realized they had both been privately drifting toward music. They moved into a loft in Bushwick, and the lines between their lives and their art began to dissolve. This multidisciplinary background explains their initial rise. Knowing nothing about the music industry, they leaned on what they did know: storytelling and image-making. They treated their band identity as a malleable medium. Early viral success came from a series called “Did You Know,” where they utilized Photoshop and jarring video transitions to weave fictional, experimental narratives about celebrities. It was a play on reality, a test of what the audience would believe, an accessible format that devolved into experimental media. A similar logic applied to their “Songs That Are The Same” series, where they played two popular songs simultaneously to reveal a magical, uncanny sync.