Meet the Layoffs

In cluttered garages on the outskirts of a Zoom call, a band called The Layoffs is redefining what it means to make music in the age of absurdity. In In Formation issue 3, just after page 112, you’ll find a very analog artifact of the band’s digital detritus — a flexi-disc for your meatspace ear holes. Right here, though, you’ll find streamable versions of two songs on that disc: “My Toyota Ratted Me Out,” and “We’re All In Formation.”

Their setups look like a cross between a thrift store and a tech startup. Vintage amps, MIDI controllers, a dusty upright piano, and a Frankenstein machine cobbled together from Raspberry Pi boards, wires, and what might’ve once been a toaster. They call it HALsie, their AI bandmate. HALsie doesn’t eat snacks, never argues about tempo, and spits out lyrics like Bono on meth.

The Layoffs — Jerry Business (Jeremy LaCroix), D-Rob (David Robinson), and J-Kay (Josh Klenert) — aren’t ironic. They are real musicians, laid off from real tech jobs. One day they were optimizing SaaS and consumer interfaces, the next they were banging out a synth-punk anthem called “Powering Down.”

Amid the analog grit and digital madness, they embrace the absurdity of it all. One track features a vocoder AI narrating a breakup with its WiFi router, backed by a slide guitar solo played through a dial-up modem filter. Another song, “Space Karen,” is a meditation on identity in the era of disappearing truths. They’re holding a mirror up to a world glitching between the sublime and the ridiculous, using tech to poke fun at tech — and doing it with guitars, DAWs, and a little help from HALsie.

The Layoffs uploaded an uprising, and it’s playing out at 33 ⅓  revolutions per minute.

– Alex Lash

---

Alex Lash is the managing editor of In Formation. He founded and edits The Frisc, a news site that covers housing, homelessness, and other civic issues shaking up his hometown of San Francisco.