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Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Eagle

Q&A: BOY

Don’t be fooled by the name- Valeska Steiner and Sonja Glass are not boys. The German-Swedish indie pop girl duo known as BOY has been making music together for the past eight years. Since the release of their debut album “Mutual Friends,” Steiner and Glass have been on everyone’s radar this year with the success of their single ““Little Numbers.”

The Eagle had the chance to chat with Steiner about BOY’s first full band this fall in North America.

Sydney Gore: What is the story of BOY? How did you ladies become a singing duo and what is your background in music?
Valeska Steiner: We met eight years ago in Hamburg in a music workshop. Sonja was already working as a bass player at that time in another band. I had just finished school and was doing another band as well. The workshop was about musicians and trying all kinds of combinations. We went there on the second day and immediately clicked and liked each other. That’s how we got together for the first time. I was still living in Zurich at that time, and then two and a half years later I moved to Hamburg. And that’s when we really started doing the band and calling ourselves BOY and writing our songs.

SG: What are you looking forward to the most on this North American tour?
VS: The tour itself, the whole thing, we are so excited about. It has always been my lifelong dream to tour the States with our music. We already did a tour in March this year, I was there with our guitar player for an acoustic tour, but we kind of missed having the whole band.

SG: Since this is your first full band tour, what will be different about your live performance?
VS: It’s probably more like the album because when we play acoustically, we always have to play the songs down and make them work in a much smaller set up. When we play with a band, we can play them the way they are meant to be. We have more possibilities in terms of dynamics and stuff like that because there are more people. We have more instruments and players and sounds.

SG: Could you tell me about the creative process of putting together the “Mutual Friends” album?
VS: It took us a very long time to record this album. In the beginning, it was a big challenge to figure out what we wanted to do at all because we kind of knew that we had similar tastes and that we liked the same things in music. It took us awhile and we tried to have the band in one room, and it didn’t really work so well. In the end, we found this way of working apart from each other, which is that Sonja records instrumental track by track at her house. She has a little studio, and she would record drums and bass and guitar, and then she sends me those instrumentals and I record the melody with lyrics to them. With that, we always work like night and day. We work really closely. The way it works best is if we have our own space, and then we get together in the studio and finish the songs together. That’s how it works.

SG: How long did you spend working on the album?
VS: Two and a half years.

SG: Are you working on any new material or are you going to wait until after this year?
VS: No, we are! We actually started writing new music a little bit this year.

SG: What would you say inspires you both to write?
VS: I think everything…I also think we’re inspired by each other.

SG: Anything else you’d like to add?
VS: We just want people to know that we’re so, so excited about coming to the States and we hope to see them at our shows.

BOY will be performing at 9:30 club next Thursday, Oct. 3. Tickets are still on sale for $25.

thescene@theeagleonline.com


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