A CONVERSATION WITH... JUNODREAM
What ends with a riddle but starts with an interview on the side of the road? A junodream interview, of course.
(photo credit: Barney Curran)
TLDR: junodream is not pretentious.
There are plenty of other things to know about this genre-fighting band, but this might be one of the ones they drilled home the most. In a 45-minute interview, Tom (guitarist) and Dougal (guitarist) assured me 15 times that they were not pretentious, though that wasn’t even a thought in my head.
So what is junodream then? On a spectacular rise, partially thanks to the release of their debut album Pools Of Colour, this English band is introducing the world to what the band’s always known about themselves.
Instead of busting into the scene in 2018 with a fully developed sound, they’ve decided to publicly evolve their sound as they grow as artists and as people. This was a bold choice, considering the current London music scene is filled with artists who seemingly already know who they are as artists.
But junodream focused on getting to know themselves as people first, which has led to the band finding themselves at home on iconic UK stages like Shoreditch’s Village Underground, Glasgow’s King Tuts, and Manchester’s Deaf Institute.
As people who have been friends for a decade, they’ve grown as individuals while seeking inspiration from one another’s paths. It’s a help and a hindrance to know each other as long as they have, where they’ll fight like brothers but end the day friends once more. It also means they can spend time debating over who the cute one in the band is.
“Well, I’m the cute one,” Dougal remarks.
“And so am I!” Tom joins in with a laugh.
“But honestly, we’ve got a complementary chemistry that naturally fits us into our roles in the band. Ed’s (lead vocals) a brilliant and amazingly charismatic frontman. He really knows what he wants and carries himself with a ‘fuck you’ attitude while being so lovely. It’s a wonder to see him on stage, he gets his energy from people and he comes alive when performing.”
Dougal is an introvert, finding his home in the studio. “I’m the graphic designer for the band which has me finding deeper connections between design and music. So you’ll find me deep in the creative concepts and figuring out the art direction.”
Jake is the glue of the band, the “mother and the father of the band” all rolled into one drummer.
Tom falls in between Ed and Tom, the extroverted introvert. “God, I know how fake that sounds,” he quips. “But Tom does a lot of our production, he’s the Chief Sound Guy and the group’s grandad.
So junodream, especially under Tom’s ‘sound guy’ direction, has gone down the scenic route sonically and artistically. They’re persistent on building what they get wrong and right to end up where they are right now -- though that’s still open to change, too.
“When things started kicking off, we didn’t want to just take everything down and say this is where we started with who we are now. Pretending to start with what we already knew wouldn’t be us,” Tom explains. “We weren’t always aware of what we sounded like, especially in the early days. Then we suddenly became aware, and knew what we didn’t like.”
He pauses. “Not to sound mean, but we knew we sounded like indie landfill. And we didn’t want to be, that wasn’t bringing anyone joy,” he continues, looking around the near-empty room to make sure no one heard the comment.
“You know, we started out as kids. We just wanted to be loud and have fun. Then we became self-aware and realised how wrong we were getting it. Then we started slowly getting it right,” Dougal continues.
Credit: junodream
Their debut album, Pools of Colour, isn’t necessarily the first chapter in them getting it right -- but it is a memorable landmark. “It represents what brought us together in the first place,” Tom explains.
Ironic that this album represents the individual members and their connections as artists and people when it dives deep into the spaces between people. Across the album, the lyrics explore ‘space’ in many of its forms -- physical, emotional, astrological. This isn’t some edgy quip about COVID-19 social distancing, but rather a commentary and perspective about how people can be so far apart even with all this technology that’s supposed to bring them together.
“It’s a pretty confusing time right now. Like right now we’re talking through Zoom and we’re connected but there’s still this sense of alienation from one another. So many people feel alienated and feel like they’re floating without a sense of control. We wanted to create something that wasn’t bleak or depressing -- we wanted to find some sense of wonder and hope and give that to people and ourselves.”
And sometimes that sense of wonder can start with something as simple as just a few blocks of colour. “From the early days, and by sheer accident, we came up with this visual identity of the band that’s just five blocks of colour that gradually evolved into shaping the meaning of the album. All of this era’s design is influenced by things that have a lot of space in them, the dramatic, the tension through that,” Dougal explains.
“We’re just observers in all of this, we don’t really get involved in politics or outwardly express our opinions on it but we are all just anxious and scared,” Tom admits.
“Scared little boys pretending to be men,” Dougal jokes.
“All of us are going through the common human experience, and we’re the ones who are sort of highlighting it,” Tom finishes.
As the band explains, they’re more of the introspective types -- but they’re very aware of how pretentious that makes them sound. This isn’t the band that will make, or profit off of, topics they have no experience in. There won’t be any anti-war anthems because they “stick to what we know,” Dougal explains. “So, we just explore what’s the ‘thing’ that drives us as people on this planet in the middle of space. The chances of us existing are so small and yet here we are destroying the planet and destroying each other. It’s just baffling so we’re trying and have a crack at it with our music.”
The dreamy, shoegazey, and downright trippy elements represent not only what bonded this band in the first place, but their experiences with the world. It’s a confusing place for everyone, a world filled with dashed dreams, broken promises, and seemingly one thousand fires at every turn.
And somehow through that chaos, junodream found a way to build a path through the fires.
Dougal puts it best when he explains who junodream is, aside from the fears of being pretentious. “We know that with the music and the art direction, there can be a bit of mysticism around us but at the bottom of it? We’re just a bunch of losers doing our best.”
(The interview actually ended with a riddle thanks to Dougal, but that’s been cut in aid of their ‘not pretentious’ style.)