interview

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interview ✦

Since bursting onto the scene with their debut EP portra, Little Rock, Arkansas duo joan—Alan Benjamin Thomas and Steven Rutherford—has crafted a distinctive reputation for sincere vocals, and genre-defying creativity. With over 200 million global streams and a loyal following of more than one million monthly listeners, joan has since chanelled that early momentum to construct a remarkable legacy, from early fan favorites like “cloudy & partly cloudy” and “hi & bye” to the duo’s 2023 debut album superglue, all rooted in their authentic artistic vision.

Their journey has even taken them from sold-out U.S. tours to 15,000+ capacity venues in Asia, and the chance to headline various festivals in the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Now, operating from their newly crafted home studio in Little Rock, joan is opening up to us about their attempt to embrace this exciting new era with their latest singles, “face,” “magic,” and the captivating 2025 playlist essential “body language.”

You’ve recently released your single "body language" following other exceptional tracks like "face" "magic" “heartbodymindsoul,” and “eyes.” How do these new songs reflect the evolution of your sound since your 2023 debut album, superglue?

Alan: Those are pretty good songs, eh? We like them! If you look at comparing what this album will be just from superglue, it might seem like a pretty big shift in direction. In a lot of ways, though, this album is us coming full circle back to where we started. I think it’s a perfect offering of showing how we’ve learned and matured so much as songwriters and producers, while staying completely true to who we are as artists. This album is darker, has a much more melancholy overtone, sort of overarching feeling of impending doom, even the songs about love and happiness. To us, it feels complex and cohesive and fresh. Kinda feels weird saying that about our own music, but we’re very proud of these songs.

With over 200 million global streams and more than one million monthly listeners, how does it feel to see your music resonating with such a wide audience, and what do you think keeps fans coming back to your work?

Steven: It’s pretty impossible to describe honestly. It's so cool that so many people listen to our music around the world, but it’s also strange because we know most of them from the internet, and if they comment somewhere online. That's what makes shows so cool, it’s so important to us to try to see the faces of the people that resonate with our music.

We wish we could just get every single person that listens to us in the same room together and have one big party. We have no idea why they keep coming back; all we know is to just keep doing our best and hope that they keep wanting to ride with us.

You just wrapped up the close friends tour and are heading out with Bloc Party this month. What can fans expect from the tour, and how does this headline tour differ from your past experiences supporting acts like MisterWives or COIN?

Steven: Yes we did, and yes we are! We actually just started the Bloc Party tour, and it is insane how different it is from the close fiends tour [laughs]. For those who don’t know—the “close friends tour” that we did was super small shows where we got as many people as we could packed into a dive bar in four different cities. We played two hours of music, workshopped songs from our upcoming album that we’re currently trying to finish, we did a Q&A in the middle of the set, and we met every single person at the merch table after. On the Bloc Party tour, we’re playing first of three bands for a 30-minute set in some of the biggest venues we’ve ever played, but right after doors.

So sometimes there are a few thousand people, or sometimes there are 500 people. We just show up and play, trying to do the best we can to make our 30 minutes special enough to leave a mark on people still by the end of the night. It's such a different mindset to be in; there are so many different factors at play, and there are pros and cons to both. The close friends tour was extremely special to us, and these shows are special for a completely different reason. Just to know that our music got us into these rooms is a very cool thing on its own.

Your music has gained traction for blending memorable pop hooks with other unique genre constructs. What inspires you to experiment with your sound, and how do you balance staying true to your roots while exploring these new spaces?

Alan: We’re glad to hear that it’s known for that—it’s important to us to let the song dictate it needs to go sonically. We try our best to always stay open to where our first instinct is telling us where to take it, because that’s usually the right move. Even if the song we wrote yesterday is completely different feeling than the song we wrote today, we’d rather do that than write the same thing over and over again every day. That’s just not interesting to us. We'd rather be a duo that’s known as capable of doing a lot of directions than to just be in one lane. That might be the demise of our career someday, but we’re willing to take that risk.

You’ve built a home studio in Little Rock, AR, where you craft your music. How has having your own creative space influenced your process, and what’s it like collaborating with artists like Mckenna Grace and NOA in that environment?

Alan: It's absolutely amazing. For so many years, we’ve been working out of bedroom studios in each of our houses, and the fact that we were able to actually have a real studio space is the dream. It's been a really cool shift for us; it’s like something just unlocked when we moved in, and everything feels limitless. It's really cool. Because it’s in Little Rock, it makes it a cool dynamic for people to take the trip to us and retreat to Little Rock to make music. It's nice to have people come in and feel like you can kinda strip the ‘industry’ thing away and just be people in a room in the middle of Arkansas making whatever music comes to us. It's very raw, and I think really great music will come out of that studio over the next few years.

You’ve had incredible success internationally, selling out massive 15,000+ capacity venues in Asia and headlining festivals in places like the Philippines and Thailand. What’s the first moment that comes to mind when you think about your time performing for your global fanbase?

Steven: We've had so many great moments, but the one that’s coming to mind right now is doing seven mall shows in seven days in the Philippines. It was such a wild experience. We had police escorts every day to take us to malls all across the city, and then literally just set up our gear and play a show in the middle of shopping malls. That's just something that is unheard of in the States, so it was a huge culture shock for us. Once we got past the shock, though, they were some of the coolest shows ever. People on every level all the way up to the top of the mall, listening to our music from across the world—pretty special.

What’s next for joan after the Bloc Party tour? Are there more releases, collaborations, or surprises in store for your fans in 2025?

Alan: We’re currently finishing our album, and honestly, it’s the best album we could have made. So much painstaking time and effort has gone into making this record. It’ll release in the fall, but we will most definitely be putting out singles until the release. Until then, go listen to our song “body language” that just came out. we love it!