Two People and a City Full of Street Cats

Lara Snow are not a person. They’re two people: Valery Sherman and Jonathan Harpak, both from Tel Aviv. This apparently confused people—something about the name reading as Scandinavian—but they are emphatically not from Scandinavia. They’re from a city with more street cats than any comparable urban center and a creative scene that nobody in Western Europe talks about enough.

Frozen melodies is how Valery describes their sound, and it’s a better description than most bands manage. The reference points she names—The Knife, New Order, Grimes—locate the work accurately: electronic music with structural coldness and emotional undertow, the kind that rewards patience. If they weren’t a band, Jonathan has said, they’d probably be a gang. Standing on corners. Snapping their fingers. I believe it.

They toured Germany and Switzerland in December 2016, playing to rooms that seemed to understand what they were hearing. Tel Aviv’s music export is genuinely underrated—there’s a strain of electronic production coming out of that city that has more in common with Berlin’s best than most people realize, but without the self-consciousness Berlin sometimes can’t shake. Lara Snow carry the tension lightly. The frozen thing, the melancholy underneath it—it doesn’t feel performed. It feels like where they actually live.