Whitney is a band featuring Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich, both of whom played in Smith Westerns. (Ehrlich also played with Unknown Mortal Orchestra.)
In a statement, Kakacek said the band's name is what they called the personality behind their songwriting.

We were both writing as this one character, and whenever we were stuck, we'd ask, 'What would Whitney do in this situation?' We personified the band name into this person, and that helped a lot. We wrote the record as though one person were playing everything. We purposefully didn't add a lot of parts and didn't bother making everything perfect, because the character we had in mind wouldn't do that.