‘The sky is blue. There is a band.’ And you need to know them.
The other-worldly force that is Boys Go To Jupiter
Your rent is too high. Your landlord refuses to acknowledge the black mould growing in the corner of your laundry room’s ceiling. You need a change of scenery, and you’re in luck! There’s never been a better time to invest in intergalactic real estate, because the ‘boys, boys, boys [Luke & Caleb], and their platonic alien friend [Jess]’ are jetting off to Jupiter and trust me, you’re going to want to be along for the ride.
In the middle of my mid-semester break, when I absolutely should have been working towards grade-dependent things with concrete deadlines, I sat down (over Zoom) with New York based Boys Go To Jupiter. A feat that I hope soon to lord over my friends and family when the band inevitably rockets to super-stardom.
My introduction to their music had come by way of an aptly timed YouTube recommendation in their single, Lovers Always Lose. High on the aftermath of my first listen, I googled ‘songs like Lovers Always Lose’, and when that didn’t yield any productive results, ‘songs that don’t sound like any other songs’. This, too, was relatively useless. So, spurred by a pipe dream to speak with the people who had delivered a completely incomparable single, I contacted their manager. It really shouldn’t have happened, considering the immense talent that Luke (guitar, songwriter, producer), Jess (lead vocals, songwriter), and Caleb (keys, backing vocals, songwriter) are hoarding between them – and the fact that I was wielding a link to a university website as my sole credential – but apparently the planets aligned. Which seems natural for a band that has had destiny on their side since their inception. Boys Go To Jupiter would not exist without a serendipitous Hinge date between Luke & Jess, coinciding with a serendipitous move-in between Luke & Caleb, turned a serendipitous certainty that they must make music together.
Pieces of this interview have been edited, and at times arranged out of chronological order, for the purposes of clarity
Cosmic Origins
Jess: I was recently out of a relationship, I was back on the apps, I came across Luke. We went on a date, it was great. Sparks fly, romance, ba-da-bing ba-da-boom. We went on another date. It rocked. And then Luke messaged me trying to make a pivot into a friendship. Everything in me was like don’t give this boy any more attention, except for my heart, which knew that there was a special thing happening between me and Luke that I would regret having not followed. So, I gave in. This was just around the same time that he had moved into an apartment with Caleb, who he had not known personally, but had had a, like, parasocial relationship with because of a mutual friend of theirs. Once I entered the fold, and met Caleb at Luke’s apartment, it was an instantaneous decision to start this project. When I think about it retrospectively, I’ve never really felt something so positively, and gutturally, and with so much abandon.
Caleb: Luke and I had been making music together for a little while before that. We’d been writing songs and having nowhere to put them, and there’s some demos of songs that have my terrible singing voice on them that were written then. But then I remember Jess coming into the picture and the knowledge that there would be a band was not even a question. It was like, ‘oh, the sky is blue. There is a band.’ And it just, sort of, was.
Luke: For a long time in my life I’ve had things and projects that, like, were cool things that were talked about. I remember in kindergarten one of my friends moved to Dubai and me and my other friend were like, ‘we’re gonna build a plane and fly to Dubai’. But I knew even then I was like, we’re not really gonna build a plane, come on. So I feel like things don’t usually come true but this one, when we first talked about it I was like well, that’s a plane to Dubai. Like, it’s not going to happen. But Jess was very adamant about it, I remember her calling me once when I was coming home from work and she was like, ‘I really, truly believe that this needs to happen, and we need to do this’. And I was like, ok, it’ll happen then.
The First Show: On Deception and Faith
Caleb: Our first show was then looming, incredibly soon. There was a date booked at this pretty big venue, maybe it holds, like, 250 people, or something. Jess was working for a record label at the time and she had an email address with the label. So she had just emailed the venue from that address saying, ‘we have these artists and you’re going to want to book them’, and here we were with this deadline and we didn’t have that many songs.
Luke: We didn’t have any songs.
Caleb: There were maybe two weeks where we were in my room like, ‘ok, I wrote this song four years ago, we can do this one’, or, ‘Luke has this song, and here’s a chorus and let’s turn this into something’. And then a couple songs we wrote from scratch in that time, and we just were cobbling it together for this big show.
Luke: Jess lied, obviously, to get us in. She said that we had played countless shows across New York, that we would have no trouble bringing people in, and we were holding true to the line until the end of the show where Jess, on stage, into the mic, was like, ‘thanks for coming everyone, this is our very first show ever’. Somewhere, one of our friends heard the managers of the venue in the back of the room being like, ‘what?’ And then later one of them came up to me and he was like, ‘this was your first show?’, and I was like, ‘yeah, but like, you know, we’ve all played in bands before,’, and he was like ‘well, I’m very impressed. You guys can play here anytime you want.’
The Essence of the East Coast
As an occasional participant in the slightly incestuous Melbourne indie music scene, I was curious to know whether New York shared a similar leviathan of underground performers. Arguably, a part of me just wanted to hear Melbourne and New York referred to as comparable hubs of artistic innovation. Luke very politely redirected my city-specific patriotism, reminding me that New York is a famously large city, one which is ‘known for how many freaks it has’. So whilst there is perhaps a mainstream sound, something he referred to as more akin to The Strokes, the city is not so confined to a singular musical palette.
Jess: I don’t know how much I attribute it to the city of New York but we are all from the North East, the East coast, and I do think the way that we process the world because of that is somewhat similar. Literally yesterday Caleb brought a song to the band and I thought he wrote it about something I had told him. I was so shocked because I was like there’s no way we were processing the same kind of situation the same way in so similar emotional frequencies. I don’t know if it’s a New York thing but there is an East-coast-ness, I think, to us.
Caleb: All three of us have slightly different music tastes but we’re all, in some ways, the exact same. We’re really kind of anal about the rhymes, and about the narrative making sense, and we get stuck in the weeds about that all the time and I don’t think that means it’s a good song, but I think something we have in common is a kind of obsession with the arc, the voice, the words and the way they feel in your mouth. I think that lots of people across genres and across scenes also feel that way. I just have a theory that everyone likes musicals deep in their heart because everyone likes characters and everyone likes stories. So if this band can be like a little hub to pull those people, I think that is a cool aim for the project to have. It’s like a musical train station where people meet up.
Lovers Always Lose
With the Lovers Always Lose music video having just surpassed 150k views upon writing this article, I asked the band about their changing relationship with the single as it attracts growing attention and how a track like Lovers, which scratched an itch in my brain like nothing else I have listened to recently, comes to be.
Caleb: The entire time I thought this is going to be our weirdest song. It’s a mixture of genres. It’s really dramatic. That bridge is so much. I’m pouring my soul into this. I don’t know if that’s the vibe. It is not the vibe of the cool indie boys who play in lower Manhattan at all. I was always a little mortified when we played it. I felt like it never fit in the set, and I was very insecure about it and I love that I was proven wrong. It just shows I don’t know anything.
Jess: It is, in some ways, what the three of us love more than anything, like the little bit of drama and cheek. We sometimes will hesitate to put that out because it’s a little more embarrassing and a little more vulnerable.
Caleb: Totally. Like Last Last Time Luke and I wrote before the band, and it was an exercise. We were like, we want to write an 80s song. It’s so easy to write in a genre. You can hide behind the genre. You know all the choices you have to make, you know how specific your lyrics have to be, you know what your subject matter needs to be because you have all these great references. I can deal in stereotypes a lot better than I can deal in being a little bit more honest. It’s always hard. You want to put up a wall like, ‘no one’s going to like this one, this one’s weird’.
Jess: Caleb wrote Lovers Always Lose completely, basically, fully himself. Usually when a person comes to the band with a full song we help with arrangements, and vocal stylings and parts aren’t always written, but he wrote the song completely. And yet, I get texts from friends all the time asking if Lovers Always Lose is about my ex boyfriend. They all think I wrote the song, which is so funny to me. It goes to show, those kinds of songs are so specific that they become general. And if you can perform them well, it’s like chocolate cake.
On Process & Performance
Boys Go to Jupiter possess a decidedly performative energy to their music that, despite the lack of ambient noise, has oftentimes fooled me into thinking their Spotify discography was recorded during a live show. Let Jess’ vocals take you through the bridge of Overconfident and tell me I’m wrong. I asked the Boys if they could offer some insight into their songwriting process, and how this differs from the version of them that gets on stage.
Jess: I keep basically a running, long note on my phone of random lyric ideas that will pop up every once in a while. I’ll write like three lines here and they’re not attached to anything. And usually what ends up happening for me is six months of my life will go by, where I’ve been trying to figure out this one personal thing that’s happened to me. I’ll not have the language for what it means but I’ll be talking about it in different ways and then all of a sudden, it will all come out at once, all these things that I’ve been ingesting will be about that thing that I’ve been thinking about.
Caleb: It’s like two forms of escapism. Jess is taking it in and is able to completely expel it once she can put it into words and I am every afternoon sitting at the piano, escaping my problems by writing a fictional story only to realise that it is about what’s actually going on [in my life] after all.
Jess: We have a little bit of healthy competition between us now I feel like too. When someone brings a fucking great song to the band, the other two are like, now I’ve got to write a great song for the band.
. . .
Jess: I think my purpose on this Earth is to be a performer. It really is the thing that I know how to do more than I know how to do anything else. For better or for worse. I think it’s why, when I met Caleb and Luke, I felt so instantly like we should be a band. I’ve been writing songs since I was three years old but it’s always been as a vehicle to get to say them in front of other people. I heard Luke and Caleb’s words and I thought, wow, I could say those words because they could feel like mine, and if I said them in front of people I know I could perform the shit out of them. And I think Caleb and Luke love to be in front of people but their first love is songwriting. I think that’s why we fit, we really are able to serve what the other people need in this band. They make me a better songwriter. I think I make them better performers.
Caleb: I don’t have the voice of Jess, I don’t have maybe all the confidence of Jess on stage, right? But I do have that little version of myself that loves to perform. So when I’m sitting here, I’m performing as I’m writing. Writing is performing, and I love that. I can perform on the stage in my head and be whoever I am, and then I don’t have to actually do that on stage and be all sharp. I can give it to Jess and she can just instantly understand it because it was written from that performance place.
Luke: I feel like sort of the black sheep of the Boys Go To Jupiter family because both of these two have musical theatre backgrounds and were always performing and I never did any of that. I will sit in my room late at night and I will produce or I will write stuff and I will compose. There is a kind of unmatched thrill in writing a song in your room alone and you finish it and you’re like, wow, look at this beautiful thing that I’ve created. And there is a completely different feeling of having it performed live. Especially now, it’s kind of insane for us, some songs that are not released, that we’ve only played a handful of times, people are singing along to them at shows, and everyone knows all the lyrics from, like, one TikTok that we posted two years ago. That’s also a crazy feeling that I think is very special.
Where the Boys Are Going
There is something magical, for lack of a better term, about the rare band who loves music as much as music loves them. Or maybe magical is the best term for it. What else explains a group of not quite yet friends performing a set built in a bedroom in two weeks to the acclaim of deceived venue managers? What is me listening to Lovers Always Lose four times in a row upon first hearing it if not a welcome kind of enchantment? This is not to discredit the hard-earned talent of Boys Go To Jupiter, but there is something intangible at play in what they create together, whether a culmination of in-group competition, the fact that they all juggle multiple roles, or simply a sincere love for their craft, I’m not sure. Whatever the element, it seems better left an enigma. The kind of thing that future documentaries will invest a staggering amount of watchtime trying to rationalise when the world comes to gather at the Boys Go To Jupiter train station. Caleb summed this sense up perfectly when asked about the band name:
Caleb: I want the emphasis to be on the going, not Boys and not Jupiter, it’s about a journey. It’s people who are together, embarking. It feels like kind of what we’re doing with our lives right now. I don’t think any of us expected to be in a band like this, or trying to make it work, and it’s kind of a leap of faith, an exciting journey – a trip to the moon.
Boys Go To Jupiter’s new single comes out October 18th, the link to pre-save is listed below along with everywhere you can find them on socials.