Junior Boys pack a pop punch

author: alexa lawlor | staff writer

A band made up of siamese twins! That’s a new one.

This electronic-pop fusion, though…

Formed in 1999, Junior Boys are an electro-pop group from Hamilton, Ontario. They performed in Regina for the first time at The Exchange on Sept. 16, and I had the chance to ask Jeremy Greenspan, one half of the duo, a few questions.

First off, how would you describe the band for people that don’t know?

Umm, I usually just say an electronic pop band or something like that. Like, you know, when I’m talking to my parents friends or something like that, I say a pop band with synthesizers. But I’m not usually so good at coming up with good descriptors, you know?

Big Black Coat is your first album in five years. What was the inspiration behind it?

Well, the inspiration was just working and, you know, getting down to sort of just doing our thing. It seems like we went away for a long time, but in reality, I was working the whole time. I did an album with another artist, Jessy Lanza, and so I actually was doing a fair amount of work. It just sort of so happened that it took five years, you know, to get the thing out.

Did that inspiration carry over into the Kiss Me All Night EP then, or was it coming from a different angle?

Exactly, exactly. It’s just like, you know, you get into a habit of doing things, working really hard, What a lot of people don’t understand is that, like, when you finish a record, there’s actually a lot of time between the record being finished and it being released. And so, once the Jessy Lanza album was finished, then I had a lot of time to just, there was nothing, you know, I couldn’t really start a big new project, and we knew a tour was happening, but I just had a lot of down time, you know?

You formed the band in 1999 right? How have you noticed the music industry change within the past seventeen years with the rise of social media and everything?

Well, yeah, I mean, people don’t buy records anymore, but you have to market yourself on social media, all that kind of stuff. I mean, I wouldn’t say they’re all very positive changes, you know, from a perspective of a working musician, but the only part that I don’t really like is the part where you kind of just have to be part of this whole marketing campaign for yourself. So there’s aspects of social media that I like. I quite like Twitter; I think it’s pretty fun, but I’m not really good at, like, managing our websites and Facebook pages, all that kind of stuff. I don’t pay a lot of attention to them, you know? Maybe we suffer because of that.

You’re playing The Exchange tonight. What’s your favourite part of touring and performing for different people in different cities every night?

Well, this tour that we’re doing is kind of an exciting one for us, because we’ve basically, in the spring, played a big North American tour, and we played the kinds of cities that we’ve played a lot, and that you expect to play on a North American tour, going and playing in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, etc. And on this tour, we basically are playing a bunch of places that we didn’t play on our spring tour. In the case of Regina, we’re playing a city we’ve never played before. I’ve never been to Regina. So, I knew I really wanted to go across Canada, and so yeah, this is more exciting for me because it’s sort of less like a foregone conclusion. I have absolutely no idea what the city’s going to be like, and after twelve years of touring and stuff, it’s exciting to just play somewhere new.

What can people expect from your show?

It’s kind of more, like, our material. We have some material that’s more higher energy and we have some material that’s sort of ballad-like and ambient, so we do more of the high energy stuff when we play live on this tour. It’s much dancier than not.

Finally, what are the upcoming plans for the band? Can we expect even more music soon?

Yeah, what I really wanted to do in the next year or so, is some more stuff like the EP, like doing EPs and twelve inches and stuff like that, as opposed to, like, going full throttle on another record right away.