Ray Bull embrace uncertainty, absurdity, and full-hearted feeling on ‘Please Stop Laughing,’ a vibrant, genre-loose indie pop album that finds Aaron Graham and Tucker Elkins threading jokes, bruises, restless melodies, and tangled vulnerability into one of 2026’s most singular and exhilarating records.

Stream: ‘Please Stop Laughing’ – Ray Bull

Ray Bull’s Please Stop Laughing plays like the sound of two artists fully surrendering to their own strange, spirited momentum – and coming out the other side with one of the year’s most exhilarating indie pop records.

Released May 8 via AWAL, the New York duo’s new album solidifies Aaron Graham and Tucker Elkins’ rightful place at the vanguard of 2020s indie pop, not because they have finally “figured out” what Ray Bull is supposed to be, but because they sound so alive inside the question. Across Please Stop Laughing, their music is beautiful and bold, dreamy and dramatic, full of spirited melodies that sweep us somewhere brighter while their lyrics keep one foot planted in all the awkward, self-conscious, vulnerable mess of being human. It’s tongue-in-cheek and gut-level sincere, funny until it hurts and tender when you least expect it.

Part of Ray Bull’s magnetism has always come from their refusal to sit still long enough to be easily explained. Graham and Elkins are musicians, artists, collaborators, characters, friends, and co-conspirators; they exist somewhere between band and project, joke and confession, private language and public performance. That slipperiness could feel like a gimmick in lesser hands, but on Please Stop Laughing, it becomes the point. Ray Bull are not trying to resolve the tension between sincerity and absurdity. They are writing from inside it, letting the laugh crack open just wide enough for the feeling to spill through.

“It almost seemed like Please Stop Laughing was going to be an identity crisis. It felt existential,” Graham reflects. “The record could have been a folk record, easily. It could have been a pop record, easily.”

That tension could have pulled the album apart, but Ray Bull make it feel like their natural habitat.

They do not so much choose a lane as build a playground out of the collision: Internet-age absurdism, classic pop instinct, indie rock looseness, tender confession, and a communal sense of lift all crashing into one another with swagger and cheer. “All That You Are,” already an Atwood Editor’s Pick, remains a gleaming standout, but the title track “Please Stop Laughing,” the focus track “Under Your Eyelid,” and the dreamy, soulful “Antifreeze” deepen the album’s world in ways that feel equally essential. You laugh, you ache, you dance in your living room; you might even skip down the street.

All that you are is a lot
But not enough for me
So get up off your knees
All that you are is a lot
So throw away the key
Or give it back to me

In hindsight, “All That You Are” now feels like the album cracking its door open early: A song of indecision, affection, resistance, and emotional overthinking that somehow lands with a grin. Its refrain – “All that you are is a lot / But not enough for me” – is both funny and brutal, a line that refuses to make the narrator cleanly cruel or cleanly wounded. That is Ray Bull’s sweet spot throughout Please Stop Laughing: Feelings arrive tangled, motives stay suspicious, and even the catchiest hooks seem to be arguing with themselves in real time.

“The ultimate dream is to have people listen to these songs and incorporate them into their story and their lives and have it hold some sort of meaning within their lives,” Graham tells Atwood Magazine.

“That’s where the most meaningful music to me sits. Our takeaway has been a sense of relief. We’ve had so many tracks just piling up and it feels great to send a whole collection of them out the door to live their own lives. It makes us want to keep going. Finish more songs and get them into the world.”

The album’s close-quarters creation gives that sense of relief a lived-in charge. Please Stop Laughing sounds like two people making work in the same orbit, letting ideas pass between rooms before they harden into anything too precious. One melody drifts from a bedroom; another voice answers from somewhere else in the apartment. The process feels less like a fixed blueprint than a conversation between instincts – Graham and Elkins interrupting, finishing, and surprising each other until the songs find their shape.

That desire – to send these songs out into the world and let listeners complete them – feels written into the album’s very DNA. Please Stop Laughing is dynamic and restless in the truest sense: Always shifting, always reframing itself, always finding new ways to make vulnerability feel kinetic and alive. On “Under Your Eyelid,” the duo take a melody born from proximity and let it bloom into a seamless fusion of instinct and longing, and motion, singing, “Just a little silence / Just under your eyelid / Stay here for the night / We can even get a bite.” It’s casual and intimate at once, a little surreal, a little bruised, and completely Ray Bull in the way it makes a private feeling feel shared.

“Under Your Eyelid” stands out as one of the album’s most central pieces because it understands how enormous a small ask can become. Its language is quirky but plainspoken, intimate without dressing itself up: “Some sad sorry Adonis in rags,” “Hometown college, wanna study the arts,” “I take a little, but I know it’s not right.” The song sits between confession and half-joke, between wanting closeness and knowing closeness can make everything harder. Its power comes from scale: A night, a bite, a little silence, and the ache of hoping someone stays.

I take a little, but I know it’s not right
I take some more just to get through the night
Don’t say I’m innocent
I say I’m on a ride
They say I never wanna give him a ride
I take some more just to
get through the night
Don’t say I’m innocent
I say I’m on a ride

Just a little silence
Just under your eyelid
Stay here for the night
We can even get a bite
Just a little silence
Just under your eyelid
Stay here for the night
We can even get a bite

Elkins put it beautifully when he explains, “The listener completes the music in a way so we just want people to take time with it and digest it. It’s been a struggle to compile the songs on this album. It’s been the combination of both a white knuckled force and a blind intuition. I think we’ve taken away this sense of trust in ourselves to make the songs happen even if we’re not sure how.”

That trust radiates through every corner of Please Stop Laughing. The album feels familiar yet distinctly fresh and new, a little manufactured and deeply felt, self-aware without losing its heart. Ray Bull are deeply serious and terminally online, art project and pop group, pranksters and poets, and their best songs thrive inside that contradiction. “Antifreeze” folds love into self-deprecating charm; the title track “Please Stop Laughing” makes the album’s comic defense mechanisms feel like a thesis, catching that split-second where a joke stops protecting you and starts telling on you; “Under Your Eyelid” finds softness in the blur between dependence and desire. “Marry a Skater” lets reckless freedom and romantic permission tumble into one another with a grin, while “Pain and Missouri” sketches intimacy through cardigans, dog parks, old chairs, and the lonely hope of being let in. Even “It’s Probably Nothing” captures Ray Bull’s gift for making anxiety sound deceptively plainspoken, shrinking a spiral into a shrug without losing the ache underneath. Their world is inviting because it refuses to be flattened. It has jokes, bruises, melodies, and movement.

Less of a fortune teller
More than a liar
Honey, we could behave ourselvеs
Or die on a wire
If we havе to, can I get a warning?
Call it off or tell me in the morning
Two of us could leave here on my Boeing
And all in all, I found it boring

Please stop laughing
Mourn the parents, honey
Go to bed now
We could get there, honey
Please stop laughing
We could get there, honey

– “Please Stop Laughing,” Ray Bull

That range is what makes Please Stop Laughing feel so undeniably alive in 2026. Ray Bull make music that feels native to this decade: Fragmented, chronically online, emotionally exposed, casually absurd, and still devoted to the old-school pleasure of a melody that sticks. Their songs understand how ridiculous sincerity can feel, but they never let irony have the last word. The joke opens the door; the feeling walks through it.

By the time Please Stop Laughing reaches full stride, it feels less like an identity crisis than an identity claimed in real time.

Ray Bull’s great gift is not only that they can make indie pop this vibrant, funny, and addictive, but that they can make uncertainty feel like its own kind of freedom. The album does not ask us to understand every layer immediately; it asks us to live with it, laugh with it, dance with it, and let its songs find their way into our own stories.

For a record called Please Stop Laughing, it leaves us with the rarest kind of smile: The one that arrives when music catches you off guard, makes you feel seen, and reminds you how good it can be to not know exactly where you’re going.

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:: stream/purchase Please Stop Laughing here ::

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 © Kyle Berger

Please Stop Laughing

an album by Ray Bull