via The Dream Eaters
Elizabeth LeBaron and Jake Zavracky like to use a tagline to describe their band, and it tells you almost everything you need to know: “The Carpenters meet Slayer.”
Glossy, sixties inspired pop harmonies stretched over lyrics about internal bleeding and crying on the bathroom floor of a Walmart. It sounds like a joke until you hear it, and then it sounds like a joke that happens to be genuinely catchy.
That’s The Dream Eaters, the comedy synth pop duo who sat down with me on The Load Out Music Podcast recently to talk about a decade plus of dark, deadpan pop and the cult YouTube series that turned them into an internet phenomenon, The Dream Eating Freak Show.
The story, as Zavracky tells it, splits into two distinct chapters. The first began in 2015, when he and LeBaron were working together at a bar in Brooklyn. Regulars kept telling the two of them, a singer and a producer, that they should make music together. (LeBaron and Zavracky spent a good chunk of the interview gently arguing over exactly whose idea it was, LeBaron’s then husband or the bar’s regulars. Either way, the pairing stuck, and eleven years later they’re still at it.)
That first era was a more traditional project, atmospheric dream pop built around LeBaron’s classically trained voice, playing to crowds that ranged from respectable to, on more than one occasion, nobody at all.
The second chapter started with the pandemic. Stuck at home with nothing but time, Zavracky taught himself video editing and camera work from scratch, skills he says he barely had before 2020. What came out of that self-education was The Dream Eating Freak Show, a surrealist sketch series that Zavracky describes as the connective tissue of the whole project now, songs, videos and sketches all feeding one dark, absurdist universe. It’s the reason the band’s audience exploded well past anything their pre pandemic run in Brooklyn ever produced.
“It has almost nothing to do with anything that happened before the pandemic,” Zavracky said of their current following.
Ask him whether there’s meaning buried under songs with titles like “I Am Bleeding Internally” or “Satan is Lord,” and Zavracky doesn’t hesitate.
“We’re all, like, screaming liberals,” he said, adding that political and social commentary shows up even in tracks that seem purely silly, sometimes without him fully realizing it until after the song is finished. LeBaron, for her part, pushed back gently on the idea that every joke carries a thesis. Some songs, both agreed, are just meant to be funny, full stop.
The pair’s backgrounds make for an interesting contrast. LeBaron trained classically, singing in a performing arts academy through high school and studying jazz in college before switching to a liberal studies degree covering English, philosophy, science and art. Zavracky never went to college and has been playing in bands since he was a young teenager, cutting his teeth in the Boston club scene, moving to Brooklyn in his mid-thirties and gradually turning bedroom demos into finished recordings.
Eleven years in, the band still isn’t quite a full-time operation for everyone involved.
Zavracky works on The Dream Eaters full time; LeBaron splits her time between performing and part time work, commuting in from Toronto; and drummer Steve, who provides much of the band’s on camera choreography and comic relief, still holds down a day job.
But the milestones are stacking up. LeBaron pointed to a New Year’s show at Denver’s newly renovated Federal Theater, the band’s biggest crowd and venue to date, as a genuine turning point.
“It kind of just was like, oh, this is what we’re supposed to be doing,” she said.
Zavracky, characteristically more guarded about celebrating, said he tries to take stock of how lucky he is every day rather than getting caught up chasing the next milestone.
What’s next is more of the same, on a bigger scale: Additional touring dates through the Midwest and Northeast, a new album called “Year End Report,” and a redesigned, deliberately stripped-down website that Zavracky is building himself, meant to work more like a simple directory than a cluttered modern band site.
In the meantime, fans can rejoice with the band’s ludicrous Instagram shorts and soak in all the Carpenter-Slayer love they can endure.