Something New: A Conversation with Worthitpurchase

Consisting of Omar Akrouche and Nicole Rowe, the new self-titled album from Worthitpurchase is a blast from start to finish. The record boasts endless replay value, thanks to its stunningly breathtaking soundscape, wonderfully entrancing choruses, dazzling vocals, and top-notch production.

OFM chats with Akrouche and Rowe about the self-titled Worthitpurchase record.

American Suburbia, Main Musical Influences of the Record, and Evolving Lyrically and Sonically

Thematically, the duo describe the record as being about suburban American mythology. “We’ve been obsessed with the notion of the suburbs; it’s been something we’ve just been orbiting forever,” says Akrouche.

“Some people like to write love songs, and we like to write songs about driving and being from the suburbs,” echoes Rowe. An example of this is “Big Canada,” which is about a recent trip that Rowe went on to her hometown, which had completely transformed into an unrecognizable tourist trap, making her feel like a stranger in a place she once called home.

Worthitpurchase draws inspiration from an eclectic range of artists for this record, but three really stand out. “It’s music, in a way, I kind of grew up listening to as a teenager … and our influences have stayed really consistent, but I would say Broken Social Scene and Boards Of Canada are the two big ones,” says Akrouche. “Boards are like the northern star for me personally. They’re one of the most fascinating and infinitely interesting bands. Boards provide. They have it all.”

“I feel like a lot of the fun, random glitches and samples that come in and out of the record are inspired by Dust Brothers,” adds Rowe.

Rowe finds that she experimented with different lyrical forms more than in previous releases. One example of this in her songwriting is painting a more vivid picture for the listener with her lyrics. “I feel like I’ve become more visual in my songwriting.” Meanwhile, Akrouche feels that their newest record is much more expansive. “We were just making things that sounded how we wanted. We wanted it to feel big. I think we got there with this record.”

Utilizing Sampling and Creating Fun Moments

Throughout this record, there are numerous samples, which was a deliberate decision Worthitpurchase made very early on. Worthitpurchase feels that they are still tiptoeing into the realm of sampling and is something quite new to them still. Both have really enjoyed incorporating sampling more into their sound and find that it has greatly widened their sonic palette. “A lot of music that has felt truly inventive, new, fresh, and free has been sample-based music,” says Akrouche. “You’re participating in this lineage of discovery that I think is really beautiful when you’re sampling stuff. Any time you kind of sample something, even if you barely do anything at all to it, you’re re-contextualizing it in a way. It feels inspiring to take something and just kind of fuck it up and make it new again.”

“It’s just like creating moments, so it’s like whenever there’s a part of the song that needs a little pizzazz of whatever, you can do that,” adds Rowe. “Sampling is fun. I feel like it’s done differently every time we do it, and it’s just dependent on what we’re into at the time or what we think is fun. I think that’s really what sampling is—It’s just having fun with your music and creating moments and collaging.” One example of having fun and creating these moments is all the glitches and weird noise in “Eye.” “In my head, it just sounded like a country song, and I think I wanted to avoid that, so making it weird and noisy was the way to do it.”

Creating “Something New”

The standout songs from the record and one of the best songs of 2025 is “Something New.” Featuring a breathtakingly mesmerizing combination of dream pop, indie rock, and electronica, an instantly catchy and beautifully ethereal chorus, a hypnotically groovy lead guitar line, and powerful duo vocals, “Something New” should be on everyone’s playlist. The origins of the song date back to 2023 when Akrouche was sick with COVID on his birthday. A few days before getting sick, he found a new guitar that he really loved and decided to buy it for himself as a little present. “It hadn’t been set up yet, and it didn’t sound right in standard tuning, like it sounded sketchy in standard tuning, so I tuned it really low,” recalls Akrouche. “I found this weird tuning and ‘Something New’ has like two unison strings. The G and A strings on the guitar are tuned to unison. All of the lead line is played just on a unison string. It gives it that bendy, warbly, funny sound. I just made it in an hour, like when I had a fever.”

Initially, Akrouche did not write any lyrics for the song. “I loved it so much as an instrumental and was afraid I had exhausted it and lost perspective on how to write to it,” he shares. “Nicole was in town one day, and we had set aside some time to work on it. I had set aside some scribblings of like kind of an idea and just sat on the couch and threw stuff at Nicole like, ‘Is this cool? Is this corny? Can I say this? Can we get away with this? Should I sing this part? What if you sing this part? What if we do it like this?’ I think we just kind of shaped it into existence, but the core of it is that it’s just a weird tuning and a weird sound, and everything kind of worked together to make it feel like the world it is in.”

“Basically, we went through Omar’s journal and wrote the lyrics by pulling things out of his journal, changing them, and adding some other things,” adds Rowe. “I don’t know if there was much intention as we were doing it, but I think it felt like this would be really harsh if one person were singing it and makes more sense as duo vocals. The [characters in the song] are talking to each other in a way, but really talking to themselves.”

Collaborating with Close Friends

Many of their friends played a big part in how many songs turned out. “Random Numbers” is a song that close friend Eric Van Thyne brought into existence. Van Thyne has worked on several Worthitpurchase records before. Akrouche and Van Thyne live together and have a piano at their house. “He would play that chord progression on the piano for like a whole year and slowly added new sections to it,” reflects Akrouche. “I was like, ‘When are we gonna record this? That sounds like Boards Of Canada! Can we please record that?’

“One night, our friend Chloe Corley left an electronic drum machine at our house, and recorded it … We ironed out the form. Eric crushed it.” After this, they included more parts to the song to flesh it out before sending it over to Rowe to add lyrics. “That song and ‘Big Canada’ are like brother sister tracks to me. They have the same sonic signature, Eric’s harmonic sensibility, and they’re both fever dream-type lyrically moments in my mind, but they embody this [suburban] world so much to me.”

“I was just matching the feeling of the song,” explains Rowe. “I think I just graduated from college at the time and was, like, freelancing, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and was also really confused and scared.”

“Heaven On Earth” is a song that existed in various forms for a couple of years; however, most of the harmony, music, and lyrics stayed the same. “We made a recording of it with our friend Spencer (Hartling), who is in a band called Harry The Nightgown whom we are really close friends with, and we were really stoked with it, except the intro didn’t feel right,” comments Akrouche. “It wasn’t until a year later that we opened it up and made a couple of changes … A lot of it stayed, but it got a facelift in a way. Part of that was changing the drums and some of the keyboards. Chloe helped us do that and came up with the chime and bell sound, which helped us re-harmonize the intro in a way. It helped the song feel way bigger than anything Nicole and I could have made just by ourselves–That’s a total group effort with everyone’s contributions.”

“Ancient Suburb” as an Epilogue

The record closes with “Ancient Suburb,” which the two find act as the perfect epilogue. “‘Ancient Suburb,’ to me, is like the keystone of the album and the thing that locks everything into place,” reflects Akrouche. “It’s the secret true meaning of the album.”

What exactly is the true meaning? Akrouche continues, “I was born in 1998, and I didn’t get a smartphone until I was like 12 or 13. I actually grew up biking around the neighborhood without a phone and coming home when the light came on, and it’s so stupid it sounds like I’m bragging in 2025 talking about that, but that was just the reality growing up in the Midwest. It’s just what you did. ‘Ancient Suburb’ is just that to me, coming home before it gets dark; that’s part of the mood. It’s this thing that was so normal to us. It was what we were promised. You grew up watching The Sandlot and The Goonies and all that stuff. It was what I wanted it to be. Instead, we got this shit (holds up his phone). It’s not that ancient either. That was, like, 20 years ago, but it feels fucking ancient now, and that’s like the meaning of it.”

Lyrically, a cult classic horror film from the 2010s inspired the song. “I ended up watching the movie It Follows and feeling really inspired by the quiet parts of that movie that aren’t scary, where she is, like, swimming in her blow-up pool in her backyard, and all the leaves are still floating around in the water and the Detroit suburb stillness in that movie,” shares Rowe. “I was inspired by that visually when writing the lyrics, as well as just the feeling of a musty old house.”

Concluding Comments

Worthitpurchase’s self-titled record drops on October 3. “To me, the record means that our perceptions of our past change over time, influenced by context,” comments Rowe.

“I‘m thinking of a quote that I have been obsessed with, Nicole is going to laugh; the quote is from the great television show Twin Peaks, where one of the characters named Mike says, ‘I mean it like what it is, like it sounds,’“ smiles Akrouche. “That’s how I feel about the record. Everything is just right there.”

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Photo courtesy of Worthitpurchase