To the completely uninitiated, the band name After is so indistinct as to sound borderline ridiculous. You can already hear the disdain: “Terrible SEO.” But Justine Dorsey and Graham Epstein’s project alchemises the sounds of a purer time when the term hardly existed – when the internet actually helped you discover brand new worlds and the slogan of the biggest search engine on the planet was ‘don’t be evil’.

The American duo’s embodiment of Y2K mall-pop and wistfulness often has first-time listeners mistaking them for an old band resurfaced by their algorithm. Dorsey and Epstein only have dappled memories of the 2000s, the haziness of which fogs up their otherwise effervescent, pristine trip-pop. ‘300 Dreams’, from their 2025 self-titled EP, evokes dreamy teenhood, portable CD players and T9 keyboards; ‘Promise (When You Go)’, from their newly released debut album ‘Fell Asleep In The Sun’, sounds plucked from the end credits of an episode of The OC.

After on The Cover of NME. Credit: David Milan Kelly for NME

After are chasing emotion, they tell NME, sitting side by side in a London hotel room. “We write so many melodies, and if they’re good, there’s something that hits. It’s a very specific feeling when it clicks,” Epstein says. “I always compare it to an anime soundtrack – a very ‘yearn-y’ feeling. It’s an unconscious thing: ‘That feels really good.’ I don’t think too hard on it.”

And as nebulous or ineffable as that emotion might be – regret or optimism, despair or deep love – it’s often something you arrive at with the benefit of hindsight, once you’re at a remove. “There’s something inherently sort of melancholic about [the name After] that I like,” says Dorsey. “The minute Graham suggested it, that was the name.”

“It’s pretty bad for like, searchability and stuff,” Epstein acknowledges, “but it’s kind of fun to have the challenge of making something that simple. It sounds cocky, but it’s iconic.”

Credit: David Milan Kelly for NME

The formation of After was, to take from Y2K-era vocabulary, serendipity. A match on the dating app Hinge in 2021 led Dorsey and Epstein on a path to destiny, a meeting that soon revealed how much two perfect strangers could have in common: a reverence for a very specific, evocative sound from the ’90s and 2000s, a shared instinctive, emotional style of songwriting, and even the same birthday of August 23, 1995.

Musically, though, they couldn’t have been more different. Epstein has a “music head” of a dad who put him onto everything from Aphex Twin and Throbbing Gristle to Fountains Of Wayne and Teenage Fanclub. “I got a lot of exposure early to really crazy things,” he says, recalling the Chris Cunningham videos his father would show him. Meanwhile, Dorsey describes herself as “the opposite”, with a love for musical theatre and “very earnest singer-songwriter stuff” – Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Regina Spektor and even Taylor Swift.

Epstein and Dorsey did not end up dating, but their friendship turned into a creative collaboration. They were initially aiming for “Michelle Branch-style pop rock”, as Epstein puts it, but ended up embracing a wider palette of influences, including trip-hop, trance, ambient and post-hardcore; Epstein would play riffs and write over drum loops pulled from the noughties-iconic soundtrack of Silent Hill. “It’s kind of, like, everything we love in one thing,” he says. “Music from our childhood, that we heard in passing.” “Or a forgotten memory,” Dorsey chimes in. “That’s the uncanny aspect of our music sometimes, where people are like, ‘I know this song already’… We’re trying to create that feeling of a dispatch from another life or time.”

“It’s kind of fun to have the challenge of making something as simple as the name ‘After’” – Graham Epstein

Few feel as transported by After’s music as their younger fans, who have never known the optimistic futurism felt at the turn of the millennium. “People who come to our shows are so young… It’s like a dream for them, the promise of Y2K,” Dorsey muses. “They have been born into such a crazy, fucked world – and we’re in it too, obviously – and I like that [After’s sound] is this sweet thing that they really connect to.”

Luckily for Zoomers, After exist in the here and now, and they love touring – tonight (September 28), they kick off their album tour in the US, and will head to Australia early next year. Dorsey recalls a recent meeting with one of their young fans: “She was like, ‘I found your guys’ music, and I really thought that I was finding this old gem from the 2000s. Then, when I found out that you guys existed, and I could come to a show, it felt too good to be true.’”

Credit: David Milan Kelly for NME

After, fresh from playing Reading and Leeds, are getting booked for bigger stages than ever. But way before the milestones and buzz started to tumble in – the TikTok virality of ‘300 Dreams’ and ‘Deep Diving’, the record deal with Mom + Pop, their spot on the NME 100 of 2026 – Dorsey and Epstein knew they had it. “It’s such a wide umbrella of people that fuck with our music: pop girls, underground rap people and hardcore people too,” Dorsey muses. “Honestly, it’s this weird thing where Graham and I both felt like [After] was a thing the minute it started, even if we didn’t have as many listeners or weren’t playing big shows.

“It sounds cocky, but we felt like everything was sort of inevitable or something. Maybe ’cause of how we felt about each other. We both really connected, and it just seemed so right,” she adds. “Then, we’ve just gotten these great confirmations along the way.”

There is another school of thought developing about After: that their music is merely nostalgic pastiche, even parody. The band may have “toed the line” in their music videos, they acknowledge, though they don’t see it in their music, nor think the criticism changes what they do. “I think people who are really deep in the worlds of [late cultural theorist] Mark Fisher and futurism are jaded about the state of creativity and art, and I get that,” Dorsey says. She’s been reading Fisher’s Ghosts Of My Life, the 2014 essay collection about the “slow cancellation of the future”, where contemporary pop culture is incessantly referential and nostalgic. “I’m always trying to locate us. I’m like, ‘What would he think of us?’”

Credit: David Milan Kelly for NME

“We’re at a weird standstill, culturally,” Dorsey acknowledges. “But I don’t know. It’s such a bummer perspective. We just see the way that the songs make people feel, and it’s very moving. We have something to offer that isn’t just pandering.”

One of the emotional pillars of the album is the song ‘Blow Out The Candle’, which takes on late-blooming inertia and stasis, themes that Dorsey considers especially relevant in our post-pandemic era. “The song’s lyrics convey this desire to break out of yourself, when you feel stuck and resistant to change,” she says. “It’s me trying to be like, ‘Get up, get out into the world. Wake up, live your life, let time pass, grow older, grow wiser’. I think that’s an important message to have in there.”

Also important to After are the fantastical elements of their music and world, which the band feel are often unremarked upon. Those calling the band poster children for a sunnier, Frutiger Aero-flavoured tech-retrofuturism might want to look more closely at the off-kilter terrains and environments that fill their world, and the darkness that often tints them – from the moody, mysterious composites that form the cover of ‘Fell Asleep In The Sun’, created by producer and artist Dreamweaver, to the abandoned factory and parched desert of their video for ‘Take Me To Sunrise’.

“People who come to our shows are so young… It’s like a dream for them, the promise of Y2K” – Justine Dorsey

A strange soup of influences – movies, books, poetry, photography – informed ‘Fell Asleep In The Sun’, many of them “super maximalist”, Dorsey realises. “It’s so important to keep a bank of unconscious images and fragments and stuff. They come out in really mysterious, interesting ways.” The duo point to the likes of 2000 sci-fi cult classic The Cell, the debut feature of Tarsem Singh, whom Roger Ebert once called a “visual virtuoso”, and the bizarre dreamworld of dark fantasy film MirrorMask by English artist Dave McKean. Dorsey recalls seeing lots of McKean material, as well as inspiring digital art from the ’90s, at the home of their friend Evan Collins, who co-founded the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, a collective that documents and indexes ‘consumer aesthetic’ visual movements (such as Frutiger Aero, a term coined by an Institute co-founder).

Epstein, who outside the band is a miniaturist who has made models and dioramas for music videos by Jennie, Khalid, Remi Wolf and more, loves to make “visually potent” music – where “people can all kind of imagine the same thing while listening to a song”. And so After are in the business of crafting strange, sparkling snowglobes of song, capturing evocative scenes that listeners can step into for a little while.

Theirs is a project of sound and image, suffused with emotion – and a thoroughly elastic, modern undertaking. “I don’t think our music could exist like any other time,” Epstein says. “There’s a lot jumbled in there from our past – it’s very 2020s in a way… and kind of nebulous and this genreless thing that’s hard to explain. I don’t see us fitting just in a pop box.”

After’s ‘Fell Asleep In The Sun’ is out now via Mom+Pop.

Listen to After’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Karen Gwee
Photography: David Milan Kelly
Label: Mom+Pop

Additional reporting by Jared Richards

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