Brooklyn indie pop duo Ray Bull lean into the chaos of indecision on their electrifying, emotionally charged anthem “All That You Are,” a soul-stirring standout off their upcoming sophomore album ‘Please Stop Laughing’ that captures the seductive spiral of wanting more while never quite knowing what you actually want – or trusting yourself enough to mean it.

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Stream: “All That You Are” – Ray Bull

We don’t want to give people whiplash, but we don’t want to bore them or ourselves either. That’s the Beatles and the Ween thing. They never did the same thing twice.

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Ray Bull thrive in contradiction.

Their music is catchy but unsettled, playful yet existential, theatrical yet deeply human – songs that feel like they’re winking at you while quietly unraveling far more serious emotions beneath the surface. On their exhilarating new single “All That You Are,” the Brooklyn-based duo channel that tension into a dramatic burst of melody and emotional friction, pairing upbeat propulsion with a narrator who can’t quite trust his own heart.

The result is intoxicating. “All That You Are” barrels forward with nervous energy – jangling guitars, restless momentum, and a chorus that hits with undeniable flair. At its center sits a line that feels both devastating and oddly seductive: “All that you are is a lot, but not enough for me.” It’s a brutal sentiment on paper, yet in Ray Bull’s hands it becomes stranger and more compelling – a confession that sounds less like cruelty and more like a person wrestling with their own contradictions.

I rented out a hotel room
The walls are white
I hope they paint them soon
Oh no
There′s a needle here
I wonder if it’s used
Oh no
Uh oh oh oh

I′m looking for a good escape
I like it here
But not enough to stay
Oh no
I want you near
But not enough to say
Oh no, oh no

That tension is intentional – as Ray Bull’s Tucker Elkins explains, the song is sung from “an unreliable narrator who is being an indecisive, hypocritical idiot.” The voice at the center of the song isn’t delivering a triumphant declaration – he’s caught inside his own tangled reasoning, pushing someone away even as he struggles to understand what he actually wants.

The song itself evolved through several musical lives before landing in its final form. “It started with this very slow, sludgy beat that sounded like people playing drunk together in a garage,” Elkins recalls. Over time the track transformed – tempos shifted, arrangements changed – until one small musical detail unlocked the entire atmosphere. “At one point I heard the acoustic guitar strumming pattern in my head, and that’s kind of where the entire feeling and energy of the song comes from.”

Lyrically, the band built the narrative from a simple image: A rented hotel room and the uneasy solitude it implies. “Sometimes you want to just find a way in,” Elkins says. “So it started with the image of renting a hotel room… then you can just ask yourself alright what’s in here.” From there, the story became an act of self-exploitation – mining one’s own flaws and indecision for emotional truth.

That self-awareness sits at the heart of the song. Rather than delivering a clear accusation toward someone else, the chorus slowly begins to feel like an argument happening inside the narrator’s own head. “I always kind of viewed the chorus as the person talking to themselves,” Elkins admits. What sounds at first like a breakup anthem gradually reveals itself as something more introspective – a portrait of indecision, insecurity, and the strange feeling of becoming a ghost in your own life:

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

Released February 4^th, the single arrives as the lead introduction to Ray Bull’s forthcoming album Please Stop Laughing, out May 8 via AWAL. For Aaron Graham and Tucker Elkins, the project has been years in the making. “This album is the culmination of years of living together, playing together, and basically doing everything together,” Graham explains. After amassing hundreds of half-finished songs, the process became one of discovery – identifying which pieces spoke to each other and which captured who they are right now.

That sense of eclectic exploration runs throughout their work. Ray Bull draw inspiration from artists who treat music like an open-ended experiment – from Ween and Wilco to Lucinda Williams and The Beatles. Melody sits at the center of everything they do, but stylistically they refuse to stay in one lane. As Elkins puts it, “We like working with variation. We can be chameleons.”

This openness not only shapes their sound, but also the way their songs function. Rather than arrive with a fixed perspective, “All That You Are” moves through a series of shifting ones, each line feeling like it could turn on itself at any moment. That fluidity becomes a special language in its own right, one that resists clean conclusions in favor of something more reflective of real thought: Messy, immediate, and often unresolved. In that sense, the song doesn’t just capture indecision; it mirrors the experience of living inside it.

“This track feels representative of the album in that it feels like it’s not coming directly from one of us or one of our specific stories,” Graham adds. “Often people don’t know if we’re being serious or if we’re just joking around, which is why the title track ended up being the album title and sort of this thread running through the album. We wanted to create this sensation of sentiments being abruptly turned on or off, narrators going from heartfelt and trustworthy to insincere and suspect. ‘All That You Are’ is more in the suspect lane.”

Your face is like a moving train
I cannot catch up
Your face is glowing in the rain
I better hold up

But if you’re tired
Or if you wait (then it can wait)
I will be catching up
If by mistake
So I will tell you
What I would say
If you were sitting right
Across from me today

“All That You Are” leans fully into that push and pull between sincerity and suspicion. Ray Bull pair theatricality with a restless, almost mischievous sense of momentum, driving the music forward at every turn. Bold, dramatic, and infectiously catchy, the song is full of angst yet buoyed by an irresistible sense of motion – a track that dances through emotional confusion instead of trying to resolve it. Like much of Ray Bull’s music, it leaves space for ambiguity, allowing the listener to decide whether the narrator is confessing, accusing, or simply spiraling in real time.

And perhaps that’s exactly the point. As the band sees it, songs only truly come alive when listeners bring their own meaning to them. “The ultimate dream is to have people incorporate these songs into their story and their lives,” they say. “The listener completes the music.”

This sentiment extends beyond a single song and into the world Ray Bull are building with Please Stop Laughing.

Written in close quarters and shaped through constant exchange, the follow-up to 2021’s debut Baby Mode carries a sense of motion that feels both deliberate and uncontained – ideas passing back and forth, taking shape in real time, never quite settling into one fixed perspective. Rather than choosing a lane, the duo have leaned into that fluidity, letting each track hold its own tone, its own voice, and its own set of internal rules. What emerges isn’t a singular statement so much as a collection of shifting viewpoints, all tied together by instinct, curiosity, and a willingness to follow a thought wherever it leads. As the album’s first look, “All That You Are” puts that fluidity front and center – turning hesitation and uncertainty into forward motion without ever fully resolving them.

Ray Bull recently spoke with Atwood Magazine about the writing, instincts, and inner contradictions behind “All That You Are,” from its winding creation to the unreliable voice at its center. Read our conversation below, and sit with a song that doesn’t always say what it means – but means it anyway.

Please Stop Laughing is set to release May 8 via AWAL.

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

Your face is like a guitar string
I play with it and wait for it to sing
I’ll sit right here
and you can say anything
Anything

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:: stream/purchase All That You Are here ::

:: connect with Ray Bull here ::

:: stream/purchase Please Stop Laughing here ::

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Stream: “All That You Are” – Ray Bull

A CONVERSATION WITH RAY BULL

Aaron Graham: This album that we just finished is the culmination of years of living together, playing together and basically doing everything together. We are constantly writing new songs so this album was a process of picking from the hundreds of almost finished songs that we have lying around and deciding which ones to give our time and attention to. It was about figuring out which songs speak to each other and figuring out which songs represent us in this moment.

Tucker Elkins: We started making some of these songs before we ever knew we wanted to be a band or before performing was even a remote possibility to us. So it’s kind of an odd journey for us to see where some of this material ended up.

Aaron Graham: We love Ween, Wilco, Lucinda Williams, The Beatles. We’re obsessed with anything that prioritizes melody. We admire artists who navigate their careers like it’s a weird art project. Right now we’re excited to get this album out. It’s the first time we’ve put out a project in years. We’re already excited about making more music and pushing the envelope and pushing our own limits of what type of music and writing we create.

Tucker Elkins: Charles and Frida Sonko, Rufus Wainwright, Nina Simone. Expressive singers.

Tucker Elkins: It came about in this winding kind of way. It started with this very slow, sludgy beat that sounded like people playing drunk together in a garage, but still kind of bouncy. It started just from a completely different place. And slowly just made different versions of it, changing the tempo and things. I think eventually it actually split off and started to become the song, and there’s a common ancestor song way back in the archives that this one came from. But at one point I heard the acoustic guitar strumming pattern in my head, and that’s kind of where the entire feeling and energy of the song comes from is in the way the acoustic guitar is being played.

The story of it to me was just about trying to create an image. Sometimes you want to just find a way in. So it started with the image of renting a hotel room, which is great because then you can just ask yourself alright what’s in here. And then you can exploit yourself, or your own weaknesses or your flaws to write something.

Tucker Elkins: I’m not sure what it means, it could mean a lot of different things. It’s funny because it’s a shitty thing to say but, I never really thought about it that way until people started bringing it up. It’s funny what you can get away with saying in a song. But I always kind of viewed the chorus as the person talking to themselves.

Tucker Elkins: To me it’s about indecision, and self-reflection. About being a ghost in your own life.

Aaron Graham: This track feels representative of the album in that it feels like it’s not coming directly from one of us or one of our specific stories. Often people don’t know if we’re being serious or if we’re just joking around, which is why the title track ended up being the album title and sort of this thread running through the album. We wanted to create this sensation of sentiments being abruptly turned on or off, narrators going from heartfelt and trustworthy to insincere and suspect. “All That You Are” is more in the suspect lane.

Tucker Elkins: The track is pretty heady as well. Just in terms of the narrator. They’re in their own head. A lot of these songs feel like writing from a place of subjectivity, of some sort of flawed understanding.

Aaron Graham: This was our first opportunity to enter album mode and have a wider breadth of expression given that we just had more space to create a world. The EPs feel like little samplers that don’t fully let you get in there and experience the world and Baby Mode was our first foray, it was a snapshot of a world of not knowing and throwing spaghetti at the wall. This album feels more self-assured and like we have a perspective we want to share. That being said, we don’t really know what it specifically is saying yet, we’re figuring that out in real time with the audience.

Tucker Elkins: I think people give more credence to songs when they’re on an album. They start to build a world and sit inside of it. I think this album reintroduces the world we started to build a couple of years ago. I think it captures our desire to be eclectic. We don’t want to give people whiplash, but we don’t want to bore them or ourselves either. That’s the Beatles and the Ween thing. They never did the same thing twice.

Aaron Graham: 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. 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.

Tucker Elkins: We don’t really have a clear idea of the takeaway. 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.

Aaron Graham: Lately I’ve been listening to some Bonnie Raitt, Hannes, Mickey Newbury, Way Dynamic, Greg Brown and Woo.

Tucker Elkins: Been listening to No Doubt, and also Gwen Stefani.

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:: stream/purchase All That You Are here ::

:: connect with Ray Bull here ::

:: stream/purchase Please Stop Laughing here ::

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Stream: “All That You Are” – Ray Bull

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