SPOTLIGHT: Quarters of Change’s Second Album is Impossible Without Each Other
THE BOYS OF — Quarters of Change only have half an hour to spare. Ben Roter, Ben Acker, and Jasper Harris sit close on Acker’s couch in his New York apartment. Attila Anrather is absent, likely getting ready for their album release party that night. 24 hours prior, Quarters of Change were in Los Angeles, going in and out of streaming buildings, doing meet and greets and playing songs off their sophomore album, Portraits, for the first time.
“It was definitely tiring, but it was exciting,” Acker tells me in a low drone. “I think that’s a dream. It definitely felt like a milestone. Not everyone can do that, so we’re super grateful.”
Although they all sound exhausted, Harris clutching a coffee and Roter in a haze, I know that they mean it.
“People now believe in us,” Roter says. “Now that we have this belief, what are you going to do with that belief? We haven’t taken the faith for granted.”
As a band, Quarters of Change take themselves seriously. Since they began making music in 2017, they haven’t wasted time. The band dedicated their high school years to practicing in basements, fleeing security in dark hours. They went so far as to drop out of college to pursue the project full-time.
Roter, the lead vocalist, spends afternoons unfurling lyrics on cafe napkins; Anrather, the drummer, paints in his home studio what would later become the Portraits single covers. Guitarists Harris and Acker build their chops through every festival and gig. They would release a couple of EPs before quickly signing to 300 Entertainment in 2021, and it wouldn’t be long until their beloved single “Kiwi” blew up on the internet.
The track told the world something quintessential about Quarters of Change. One, that the band is endowed with severe technical talent. Two, that their music unfailingly reaches into the pit of your stomach — an act demonstrated by Roter’s vocals but owed to the four of them as a whole. It would later come time for Quarters of Change to top “Kiwi,” which they wrote in high school (and what Roter once called “the bane of their existence”), and replace it with something just as shattering. Into The Rift’s “T Love” did just that in 2022.
“With Into the Rift … you think [your debut is] your surface to build your foundation on, but really I think it’s the way to break the surface,” Acker tells me. “[Portraits] feels like our first time — like Ben said, the eyes are on us. There’s a lot of belief. It’s our chance to be like, ‘This is who we are.’ It feels like the first time in a weird way.”
After their debut released late in summer of 2022, the band hit the road as openers for Bad Suns for their Apocalypse Whenever tour. When the boys returned to New York, each of their lives looked a lot different from when they left.
“We had all just come out of relationships,” Acker starts. “So a lot of change at once, and … a dark winter. Everyone was going through their own pain during that time. Looking back, there was definitely an energy about the four of us that was really synchronized.”
In December of 2022 (“As close to winter solstice as you can get,” Roter says), the band left the city for a cabin in Woodstock. They would hide away for two weeks and write Into the Rift, following in the footsteps of Elliot Smith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Bon Iver. In those blue-tinted 10-hour days, Quarters of Change had nothing but their instruments, gear, and their videographer, Amyas Ryan.
Thus, we get Portraits: an album in the truest sense of the word, in which unlike the culminated remnants of Into The Rift, Portraits contains pieces of a whole. Taken from and spoken by Roter, Acker, Harris, and Anrather, by tongue, rhythm and melody, formed together, the project would fall apart any other way. The band flips inspirations like Prince and The Police on their head and naturally channels Beck, Muse, and The Temper Trap. Quarters of Change have unlocked something in alt-rock, just by opening up.
Portraits has four singles, one for each band member on the cover. Harris is on album opener “What I Wanted” — in the music video, he prowls New York drinking out of bottles disguised in paper sacks. Anrather is on “Hollywood Baby,” its lyrics beginning with “Attila said that we were born to scream”; Acker’s domain is “Do or Die,” whose skate music video playfully reflects its lyrics. On the final, and perhaps the strangest single, “Heaven Bound,” Roter is optimistically nihilist, drawing clear lineage to his philosophical musings.
Tucked beneath the drama and length of singles are precious narratives that the band seems to pour out only in music. They shy away from detail when I ask them about them (“It’s about… depression,” Roter says when I ask after “Depression II”). But the lead vocalist seems most open about the album closer, “Keep My Blood.”
The lyrics are painfully opaque, but the song is, according to Roter, one of the most optimistic on the album. Despite the track’s heaviest moments when Roter croons, “I’m gone, I’m gone, I’m gone,” its resolution is an oath to remain, to drag and be dragged and still choose to stay.
“When we get into the room together, we’re all playing together, I close my eyes and let the music come in and try to, without thinking, sing and see what comes out,” Roter shares. “It surprises me a lot. I think how I’m processing the music that’s coming in, how that’s relating to whatever in my heart wants to be said… I think that’s my favorite way to write.”
Before I know it, the boys have to run to their release party, which they’re already late to. In a couple hours, “everyone in [their] lives who make this thing worth it” will hear Portraits in full for the first time. Their album documentary, Portraits of a New York City Rock Band, directed by Amyas Ryan, will premiere that night at Fotografiska Museum in Manhattan, showcasing visually what the album shares sonically.
It’s still only January — after exhausting their road to Portraits, they have a whole year left to tackle.
“And you know, it’s just another one,” Harris says. “We’ll be on to the next one soon.”
