The Army, The Navy with Ella Woolsey

The Army, The Navy hails from the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, embraced by the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. In the morning, dense fog encircles the mountain’s peak only to burn off by noon, when the sun’s rays penetrate dense canopies of redwoods. Maia Ciambriello and Sasha Goldberg no longer live here, but they’ve carried home throughout their discography—the natural world tethers their astral songwriting to Earth. On their debut album, Fake Brave Life, The Army, The Navy tap into a cosmic power. The album is courageous, desperate, and exhausting all at once, a chronicle of what it feels like to take a risk, to fake bravery in service of a dream. It’s an album for and about artists, whose insecurities are displayed each time they make an offering to an audience, hopeful that it will resonate. The Army, The Navy describes this as their most existential and intentional project to date, a moody odyssey through a dark, rainy night before the break of dawn.

Fake Brave Life follows The Army, The Navy’s 2024 EPs, Fruit for Flies and Sugar for Bugs. The duo amassed a following beginning in 2023 when their single “Vienna” caught fire online, leading them to open for artists like Dora Jar, Paris Paloma, and Matt Maltese. Last year, they sold out the majority of their headlining Gentle Hellraiser tour which took them across the United States and broadened their audience. Initially taken with spare production, The Army, The Navy threw themselves into making Fake Brave Life in both Athens, GA and New York City alongside producers Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Of Montreal, Toro y Moi) and BLEACHERS’ Mikey Freedom Hart (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, The Chicks). What started as an intimate process between two friends evolved into a full-blown studio production with session musicians and a string quartet who helped enact their vision.

Though they’d known one another for more or less their whole lives, Maia and Sasha only grew close as undergraduates in New Orleans, where both studied songwriting. In a city rich with cultural history that, like jazz, rejects a plotted path in favor of improvisation and spontaneity, The Army, The Navy took shape without a plan in mind. As roommates, the duo worked on songs individually–Maia in one corner of the room, Sasha in the other–but eventually they were drawn to one another’s process, combining ideas to build something new out of two distinctive minds. Neither can pinpoint the moment they decided to be a band; it felt like an organic outcropping of their growing relationship and the adopted city they love.

Now, the duo live together in Los Angeles, where they keep up the practice born in a tiny dorm room. Day to day, they gather verses in a thick, clothbound notebook known as “the Bible,” where their scribbled ideas eventually cohere into songs. Though it’s been years since New Orleans, some of the songs on Fake Brave Life originated soon after The Army, The Navy’s inception. The duo built the scaffolding of the haunting call-and-response “Walls” ages ago, its slow construction mirroring the lyrics the duo breathily deliver. “But I think you deserve a little more than that,” one sings and the other echoes: “I think I deserve a little more than that.”

“Walls” is one of the few instances of dialogue on an album that so succinctly combines the duo’s unique lived experiences. Because their lives are so entangled, “all of her breakups are my breakups, all of my breakups are hers,” Maia says. Many of these songs are about love and the loss of it, The duo agrees the empowered breakup anthem “2 Collide” features some of the best songwriting of their career. A willowy guitar opening builds momentum as the song’s narrator gathers her strength. “I’m not gonna drop to my knees and give you what you want/ This time,” the duo sing together, their voices melding into a shared experience.

As often as The Army, The Navy use their lives as lyrical fodder, their output shouldn’t be read as pure autobiography. In the favorite songwriting class they repeated as undergrads, the duo would be asked to write in the style of another artist. It gave them the dexterity needed to inhabit characters in worlds far removed from their own. The monumental, string-powered “Stars Stay Awake” could soundtrack the apex of a blockbuster. “It’s very Hunger Games coded,” Maia says. “Very Sapphic,” Sasha adds. The song is as cosmic as its title suggests, the chorus hitting like a rocket breaking the sound barrier. “You know our world is ending/ Your cosmic and condescending nature brings me back to places/ I’m not nurtured, I’m not safe in.”

Indeed, Fake Brave Life is an intense album, but the deep indigo sky the duo pictured throughout the writing and recording process is cut through by the light of distant stars. “We’re always pulled by stars and fire when we write,” Sasha says. “Light is very important in our lyrics.” That bright light reveals itself on the delightfully pissed-off “Pretty, Pink and Soft,” which builds to a fiery apex before it breaks down to a gentle, hula-like rhythm. In most of their songs, The Army, The Navy play lovelorn victims, but “Pretty, Pink and Soft” reverses the script. “I don’t like second chances/ They’re so out of fashion,” they sing on the chorus. “You can’t read my mind/ But I think I like to keep you guessing.” It’s a playful anger, shed by the song’s end.

Fake Brave Life closes with its title track, an epic suited to the landscape The Army, The Navy was raised in. The churn of a bassline guides the listener into a mystical scene, where the mountains collapse under the weight of raw emotion and self-belief can make a person fly. “You have to be brave to put out your music into the world, you have to be brave and know some people will not like it, and faking that bravery for enough time translates to true courage,” the duo says. “We want our listeners to feel seen, their vulnerability and bravery acknowledged. We want them to find a resonance in the lyrics and digest it. We want them to feel propelled to do scary things even if they don't have the confidence to do them.” To be fake brave is to come upon your bravery by happenstance, which is exactly what The Army, The Navy did in their dorm room all those years ago. For them, this has all been a wild adventure they relay beautifully on Fake Brave Life.