Arkansas-based alt pop duo, joan, are known for crafting expansive pop music and have spent the past few years steadily releasing new music, touring and building an incredibly passionate fanbase of joanlyfans. From their debut EP portra, to their debut album, superglue, the band has amassed over 150 million global streams to date, boasting over one million monthly listeners across streaming platforms. With each release, joan continues to push the boundaries of their sound, building on their unique ability to create heartfelt, infectious pop music. In this Emerging Headliner interview powered by JBL, joan (Alan Benjamin Thomas and Steven Rutherford) reflect on how they met, their unusual band name, and reveal why their latest releases are the most ‘joan’ songs so far.
How did you meet and when did you form a musical duo?
SR: We both were in separate bands, and we're in Little Rock Arkansas. There's not a huge music scene here. We ended up playing a bunch of shows together, so we met that way. We went to the same college, but at different times, and knew of each other. I knew that we both were doing music, and I was coming out of school and wanted to do music full time.
Alan had been doing music full time already, so we got together to try to write for film and TV doing sync stuff. That first day, we wrote what ended up being our first single, take me on, and it was like literal magic. We had been looking for that spark, and it hadn't quite got there with other bands. We were just like, ‘I think this is the band we need to be’. It's been full time joan since then.
AT: We first started writing in late 2016, and then in January or February of 2017 we soft released a song on SoundCloud, and that got us some early attention. This was when SoundCloud was a little bit more of an A&R ground for discovery, which maybe it still is, but back then it felt definitely more so. We got our team together after that, and that was the catalyst.