LOBE Finds Joy in Chaos and Childhood Nostalgia on Debut Album 'was that on purpose?'

When a band shows up with jazz chops, folk-pop softness, video-game textures, and the chaotic delight of childhood wonder… you don’t expect it to make sense. But LOBE isn’t here to play by your genre rules, they’re here to play with them.

The Bay Area ensemble drops their debut album 'was that on purpose?,' a nine-track trip through improvisation, friendship, and the kind of musical chemistry you only build by growing up together creatively. What started as casual hangouts inside Stanford’s jazz program turned into a collective obsessed with rhythm, experimentation, and the weird beauty in mistakes that accidentally become magic.

The record feels like a memory box cracked open, flute lines that sound like Saturday-morning cartoons, violin sweeps that feel like rain hitting a window, polyrhythms that snap you sideways, and arrangements that jump between jazz, alt-folk, disco brightness, and Ghibli-soft balladry without blinking. Every track feels like a question with two answers: one intentional, one instinctive.

Rather than anchoring themselves to a single bandleader, LOBE writes like a brain with six minds plugged into it. Their sessions blur the line between rehearsal and therapy, crafting pieces that stretch, contract, and evolve every time they play them. It’s high-level musicianship wrapped in a wide-eyed, playful soul, serious music that refuses to take itself too seriously.

Songs like “Sucker Punch,” “Hummingbird Dances,” and “Moon Jelly” capture that dual spirit: meticulous composition sparked by improv-driven chaos, shaped by the trust of a group that genuinely grew up together. And their reimagined “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," rooted in a children’s bossa version Daiki Nakajima loved as a kid, sums up LOBE’s whole ethos: nostalgia, experimentation, and a willingness to follow an idea until it gets weird in the best way.

'was that on purpose?' holds onto that tension between craft and chance, a studio album built on the energy of moments you can’t recreate twice. It’s a debut that doesn’t just introduce a band; it lets you sit inside their friendship for 40 minutes.

We sat down with LOBE to talk about the album’s strange origins, the joy of improvisation, and why embracing the unpredictable became their creative north star.

This album embraces improvisation as a core philosophy. How do you balance structure with spontaneity when writing together?

LOBE would for sure not be LOBE without improvisation, and we always include sections of songs that are vehicles for allowing ideas to flow in the moment. In some ways, our songs are similar to a lot of jazz compositions. We have written-out, defined ideas and freer interpretive sections where we improvise over the chords and related structures that the written-out sections help establish. Perhaps different than a lot of jazz artists is that our songs often have longer written-out sections for developing ideas, though even these contain parts that are largely open to interpretation by the rhythm section (bass, drums, guitar, piano). Because of that, it was really important to us to record the album live, with full-band takes as much as possible, because of how each of us plays influences the rest. 

Each member brings a distinct voice. How did you shape songs around individual strengths without losing cohesion?

Because we know each other on a personal level really well, and because we’ve been playing together for so long, the compositional ideas we generate are already bespoke for the members in some sense: the way we write already keeps each person’s voice in mind from the start. We tend to write for the people, and not just for the instrument. Oftentimes, when we bring our songs into rehearsal, the band makes the songs sound ten times better than what we initially imagined in our heads, and this is always a magical feeling. This willingness to change our ideas during rehearsal allows for our compositions to grow organically around each musician’s input and abilities.

Childhood nostalgia shows up in both sound and concept. What early musical memories influenced the album?

One thing that interests us in the music we make is playing with the concept of play. We aim to make songs that are fun to play and fun to listen to; we emphasize inviting our audience into our music rather than presenting it for consideration. During our improvisations, we have the privilege of childlike freedom because we know we can trust each other when we take playful musical risks. Music is mischief! 

In terms of childhood influences, we played a lot of video games growing up (think Final Fantasy, Kirby, Pikmin, Zelda, Pokémon, Sonic, Animal Crossing… ), and that harmonic language definitely permeates our sound (lots of ♭VI chords). Otherwise, what we listened to as kids ranged pretty wildly, for some of us, jazz (John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, Bela Fleck/Victor Wooten) was a common sound growing up, whereas for others, J-Pop (Perfume, DREAMS COME TRUE, SPITZ) and Motown/soul (Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind and Fire, Tower of Power) proved formative influences.

Reimagining “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” in 11 is a bold move. How did that arrangement come together?

Though the rhythms and harmonies differ greatly from the original, this arrangement actually came very naturally. We tried to be maximally playful in this song and make it full of surprises, so it’s constantly shifting and morphing in and out of the core 11-beat feel, even moving between different groupings within 11 beats (4+3+4 and 5+6). We also focused on not only making the arrangement really creative but to also make all these sections feel cohesive and obvious, like “oh, of course the LOBE version of Ob-La-Di sounds like that!” 

The final groupings and feel came together after a rehearsal that only Daiki and Michael could show up to, at which Daiki brought in an early version of the song in some odd meter that we don’t remember. Michael suggested another feel (9 beats split in 5 and 4) which we didn’t end up going with, but it helped Daiki figure out the final Ob-La-Di version you hear on the album. 

After three years of collaboration, what moment made you realize that this project had found its true identity?

When we started our first recording sessions, we didn’t really consider the prospect of an album: we just wanted to immortalize the compositions for our own listening. As our group continued to grow together, we kept recording, listening, and learning until we eventually had one recording session (around March 2023) that we felt just wasn’t good enough. 

This called into question what these sessions had to be “good enough” for: ourselves? Sharing with friends? With the world? We eventually realized that the compositions and our playing warranted the effort to improve and make recordings we are proud of. Our standards for these recordings had evidently reached some kind of threshold, and we eventually wanted to share this music with the world.