From Island Records to the beyond: Babystep Magazine interview with NYC’s Laptop

NYC’s Laptop return with a holiday release that dodges tinsel and leans into truth. Reimagining Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” as a deadpan, jazz-robot confession, the track lands somewhere between heartbreak and a knowing smirk — a song for anyone who’s ever survived December rather than celebrated it. Now operating as a dual-frontman project led by Jesse Hartman alongside his son Charlie, Laptop continue to blur irony, emotion, and outsider storytelling, building on a legacy that stretches from Richard Hell’s Voidoids to Island Records releases. This is Christmas music for people who can’t quite afford to believe in Christmas — and that’s exactly the point.

 “Indie Hero” is both a love song and a hate song—equal parts nostalgia and disillusionment. When you think back to that night in Tokyo, what moment best captures the collapse of the ‘myth of cool’ for you?

I was nineteen at the time—exactly the age Charlie (who joined Laptop this year) is now—and I’d just been hired to Japan to play guitar for one of my older punk rock heroes. Which was amazing of course. It was my first tour, and the mythology around these guys was still very big in my head. After a lot of Japanese whisky, one of them decided it would be hilarious to dare our drummer, just a little older than me, to dive onto a neighboring table in this trendy restaurant we were in. And, well, he was impressionable, and wanted to prove he was punk, so he actually did it. Plates, glasses, sushi, strangers—everything went flying.

It was chaos, and in a weird way, it was funny. But in that moment, watching these people I’d idolized behave like frat boys in a foreign country, something broke. The table collapsed. The cool collapsed. The myth collapsed. It shook me enough that I took a break from music for a while and started making films instead. Eventually I came back—first with Sammy, and then, a few years later, with Laptop.

The track grapples with idol worship and eventually outgrowing it. How has your relationship with your own heroes changed over the years, and what made now the right moment to revisit that tension?

When I was starting out, I treated my heroes like deities. They were these untouchable figures who made the world feel bigger and cooler than it really was. Meeting them in person chipped away at that illusion: some were generous, some were bitter, most were just trying to survive like everyone else. Over time, the pedestal I’d put them on shrank. I still admire them, but I’ve stopped asking them to carry my dreams for me. I’m good making my own path now.

“Indie Hero” felt timely because I’m at an age where I can look back with both affection and clarity, and because I’m watching the cycle repeat with my son. Charlie is discovering his own heroes in an era where everyone is hyper accessible; the myth of cool collapses faster when you can scroll through your idol’s breakfast on Instagram. We’re also living through a moment in music where reinvention is constant and nostalgia is commodified. Revisiting my own disillusionment gave me a way to talk about those changes. It’s essentially saying: it’s okay to love your heroes, it’s okay to outgrow them, and it’s okay to become someone else’s hero without pretending to be perfect.

This new chapter sees Charlie stepping in as co-frontman. When did you start collaborating for this project and how did that father–son dynamic shape the writing and recording process? What surprised you most about collaborating together?

Charlie was a crazy little kid with a big imagination. We actually started collaborating when he was three—he would make up melodies and lyrics while sitting on my lap at the piano. The songs that became “Weirder,” “I Don’t Know,” “Squirrel A Bug” and “Thirst” all have their roots in those early, improvised sessions. We didn’t revisit them until years later when we starting digging through those old home recordings; hearing his tiny voice sketching the beginnings of what became fully formed songs was wild and strangely moving. The rest of the album’s tracks are more typical Laptop manias—me obsessing over synthesizer sounds and sarcasm at 3 a.m.—but they also benefit from his input.

Recording together now is a very cool experience. The father–son dynamic forces me to be a better collaborator, because your kid doesn’t care about your past; he just cares if the song feels honest. Charlie’s sense of melody and his willingness to push me out of my comfort zone were the biggest surprises. He was the one who fought to keep some of the weird, rough edges I would have smoothed over. It turns out having someone you raised telling you “Don’t over edit this, Dad” can be pretty liberating.

Laptop has always balanced satire with sincerity. On “Indie Hero,” how did you decide where to lean into humor and where to let the more tragic or reflective elements lead? How does this single compare to the three singles you've released in the run-up to this one?                                                                                             

We’ve always tried to make humor and sincerity serve each other rather than compete. On “Indie Hero” that meant letting the verses tell the truth about disillusionment—there’s no wink when I describe watching a hero behave badly—while using the chorus to exaggerate the absurdity of idol worship. Singing “I’ll dive across a table for you, my Indie Hero” with a straight face is funny precisely because it’s rooted in a real, bizarre experience. We didn’t want to undercut that with jokes in the wrong places, so we let the melody carry the emotion and saved the satire for the parts that needed it. Compared to the singles that led up to this one, “Indie Hero” is more narrative and personal. “Weirder” imagines an alien landing and being utterly confused by us all; “Additional Animals” is about our own absurd consumption—me included; and “I Don’t Know” is set in a school but really about living in an authoritarian world (sound familiar?). Those songs tackled big themes about the strange times we’re living through. “Indie Hero,” by contrast, zooms in on one very specific moment in that universe: the night the myth of cool finally cracked for me. It keeps the dark humor and cinematic synths of the earlier singles, but it adds a clear storyline and a love/hate letter to the idols we all eventually outgrow.   

As I understand, your upcoming album On This Planet explores such themes as fame, failure, and artistic immortality. What other larger questions were you trying to answer about survival—as an artist and as a person—in an industry obsessed with reinvention? Also, when is this album coming out and what else do you have up your sleeve for the next half-year or so that we should look forward to? 

In the beginning, Laptop was mostly me writing about relationships that didn’t work out, wrapped in sarcasm and synths. Over time, those small personal dramas started to feel less urgent than the bigger drama playing out around us. On This Planet began as a record about fame, failure and artistic immortality, but it quickly became an album about survival in a world that’s gone off its axis. The songs reflect the weirdness of now — an alien landing and being baffled by us, our absurd consumption, authoritarian undertones in everyday life. They ask how you stay yourself when everything around you feels strange. These aren’t relationship songs — although we’ll get back to those on the next record — they’re songs about what it means to live through this particular moment.

We’re planning to release the album in spring 2026. In the next six months you can expect a handful of new singles that expand this world, some videos and short films that accompany the songs, and a few surprises from the mountain of material we recorded in Valencia and Nevis. It’s all part of the journey toward making sense of the world we’re in, and we hope you’ll find it as fascinating as we do.