Friendship influences everyone, but Alex and Lolo have harnessed that influence in a particularly special way. The LA-based songwriting duo is a musical force to be reckoned with, and if you don’t know them now, you will soon. With their single, “You’d Like Me More,” having surpassed 655,000 streams on Spotify, and the pair already having performed at the 2025 Bourbon and Beyond Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, the career of Axel and Lolo is on a steady incline.
Who are Axel and Lolo?
Lauren Vice (Lolo) and Axel Rodriguez met when they were freshmen at Berklee College of Music. In the first few sessions the two had together, they quickly noticed something interesting happening. In an interview with Trill, the duo spoke on the experience.
“We hung out for a long time, and then we started writing. And then we sang a cover of a Maggie Rogers song with our friend in the stairwell,” said Rodriguez.
Classic Berklee…
“And we were playing it back,” Vice chimed in, “and we couldn’t tell whose voice was whose.”
“That was the moment we realized we have similar voices, and that was so fun and cool,” Rodriguez added.
When Rodriguez and Vice sing together, it sounds like one big, beautiful voice. The voice will sing a strong melody, then split into a deep harmony. And after settling on a name and joining as a band, the pair melded together as closely as their voices, singing in unison.
A musical fantasyland of emotion
Through just six released songs and a thirty-minute conversation, it’s easy to tell the pair love each other deeply. Love, in its various forms, appears throughout Axel and Lolo’s music in different ways. Some days, they want it. Some days, they feel it. And in others, they are missing it.
None of this is to say that what the duo primarily makes are strictly love songs. In fact, it would be reductive to categorize their art in any way, and forcing it into a genre is near impossible. It is music, but it is music that you can see. Axel and Lolo aren’t just making songs. They are, as they say on their website, “crafting a musical fantasyland built upon a profound personal connection.”
This fantasyland is as vibrant and complicated as the feeling of happiness itself. In their latest release, “Get Me In Your Lifetime,” one guitar is heard. Still, wisps of color and an orchestra with fluttering dancing between the frequencies. On the edges of the sound, the pair scattered. Down the middle lies something that could be interpreted in different ways.
There is sadness. But the sadness sits next to a particularly unromantic sense of yearning for a love that’s hard to make sense of. The lyrics are somewhat self-critical, but realistically so. They sing the feelings that we feel but don’t want to admit.
It all comes from me, the anger I believed was coming from your end.
~ Get Me In Your Lifetime
Emotion is not an easy centerpiece to wrangle into a body of work. But Axel and Lolo see it less as writing songs and more like giving advice, advice that Axel admits he should follow a little more sometimes.
City of Angels
For Berklee graduates, there are only three places you really end up: New York, Nashville, or Los Angeles. And after spending time in each, the sunny weather of L.A. resonated most with Rodriguez, who was raised in Puerto Rico, as well as Vice, coming from Northern California.
“We’ve only really just scratched the surface,” said Vice, “but already we see that it’s full of so many cool, weird, artsy people, and that’s our vibe.”
As any young artist knows, packing up and moving to L.A. is a risk. In many ways, it’s as much a gamble as pushing all of one’s chips into the center of the poker table. It means putting the safe path in life in the rearview mirror and going all-in on passion, trust, and hard work.
Yet, the duo procured a special confidence from, as Vice puts it, “being with your person.” They agreed that neither would be in L.A. if they were pursuing solo projects. The pair relies on one another for advice of all kinds. Be it artistic confidence or emotional intelligence, the brains of Axel and Lolo are wired together by twelve ringing guitar strings.
“Since we both love each other so much and there’s so much belief in each other’s creativity and passion and art, it makes you believe in yourself,” Vice said, smiling at her bandmate. “Being with Axel makes me think, ‘Oh, this is just my career path.'”
Politics, sexuality, and bomba
As with any art, personal identity and history have shaped the pair’s music in many ways. Vice and Rodriguez are both queer musicians, one raised on 90’s girl country and the other on Puerto Rican bomba.
“In bomba, you’re improvising rhymes with a beat,” said Rodriguez. “It’s songwriting on the spot, and that has definitely impacted how I make music.”
“That’s so you,” Vice added.
Vice and Rodriguez have never shied away from standing up for what they believe in, and identity plays a part in that. “Art is political,” Vice pointed out, highlighting their passion for sharing underrepresented stories that deserve a place in the spotlight and using their art as one of many vehicles for change.
“We don’t have a giant platform yet, but so many artists haven’t said or done anything,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t want to be that.”
One of the songs on the duo’s upcoming EP will be titled “American Revolution.” Although they only have a loose timeline for the project’s release, they are planning on dropping a single late this summer.
If you’d like to hear from the artists, you can sign up to receive their first upcoming newsletter and access their socials here. Start with “Get Me In Your Lifetime” to get a sense of Alex and Lolo’s music, then work through in any order you feel fit. You can listen to their music on all major streaming platforms.
Oh, and they both want you to watch “Steven Universe.”
