Ray Bull

Who is Ray Bull? 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. Word began to spread, and Ray Bull quickly amassed over 600k followers on TikTok and another 500k on Instagram; these followers soon became fans of the band’s original songs, to the tune of over 40mm global streams. All of this was content, sure, but it was also a manifesto: Ray Bull sees the continuous thread running through art and pop culture and rearranges it to fit their own design. That design was forged in the physical proximity of their apartment. Please Stop Laughing is the sound of two people living, sleeping, and creating on top of one another. The writing process wasn't just collaborative; it was osmotic. One would play piano in the living room while the other shouted melodies from the kitchen. The song “Under Your Eyelid” serves as the perfect artifact of this environment. Elkins, hearing a melody drifting from Graham’s room, pulled out his phone to Shazam it, hoping to add it to his library. When it came up empty, he realized it was Graham. He walked into the room, they jumped on the track together, and the result is a seamless fusion of their instincts. The album reflects this "everything at once" mentality. It creates a sonic world that feels familiar yet distinctly fresh and new, borrowing from the sheen of 80s synth-pop, the intimacy of 70s Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters, and the polished hooks of contemporary Top 40. “It almost seemed like Please Stop Laughing was going to be an identity crisis. It felt existential,” says Graham. “The record could have been a folk record, easily. It could have been a pop record, easily.” But rather than choose a lane, they chose the collision. The relationship between the two is felt most strongly in the friction between the tracks. “Marry a Skater” carries an irony and humor that feels lifted directly from their private banter (“I got a friend,” sings Graham, “He spent a year in the Bahamas / working on his manners”), while “All That You Are” offers a darker, more complex view of duality. Elkins describes the latter as coming from “an unreliable narrator who is being an indecisive, hypocritical idiot.” Ray Bull was never going to be a band in the traditional sense because neither Elkins nor Graham set out to be musicians. They set out to be artists, and music just happened to be the most effective canvas. “We can be chameleons,” says Elkins. “We like working with variation.” Please Stop Laughing is the result of five years living and creating on top of each other. The album is an honest reflection of a manufactured identity, and the beautiful, messy dynamics of two artists working as one.