Did you guys always plan on being bôa? Did you always plan on coming back together and playing more shows and releasing another album?
JR — No, we had all gone our ways doing different things. I retrained, went to university, I was doing solo music. We did a 21st anniversary show for Lain where we sort of caught up and started jamming and we realized…
LS — It worked.
So you never really had to relearn how to be a band, did you?
LS — It was simmering very, very low.
JR — In terms of sound, I think we’re a lot more streamlined. And the songwriting process this time was different, in the sense we turned this around really quite quickly. It feels like about a million years, but from the moment we set foot in the rehearsal studio to start writing with each other — to now, it’s been about two and a half years — which isn’t actually that much when you think about how we hadn’t written anything and then we were immediately coming up with ideas.
How did this reunion come about? Did you all just text each other like, “Let’s get back together?”
JR — We signed with Nettwerk around late 2021, and they asked us, “Do you want to release old music that you haven’t released before? Or do you want to write a new album?” And we were like… “Oooh…” Then we started in the studio around March or April 2022.
When you were on your own, were you ever thinking about getting back together?
JR — Not for me, if I’m really honest. But for Alex and Lee, I think you guys thought about it, but I hadn’t.
LS — To make an album happen, a lot of things have to come together.
JR — If we were going to do it, we wanted to do it well. And I think we’ve had really good support to be able to make this album. The label has been the kind of people that we can just ring up and talk to. We had strings because what Paul brought to the music was really important to us. And having that dynamic in what the new album was really important. But that’s a lot more to consider. That means working with other artists to deliver, but we did and it was great. We worked with Chris Zane who’s from “New Yoik.” That was my New York accent…
It was definitely an accent…
JR — It was an accent! [laughs]
LS — It was…
JR — I probably couldn’t do a better one.
It’s ok
JR — Chris is excellent. He’s probably seeking therapy from working with us but we enjoy working with him. And it turned out really well, and now we’ve got a really lovely band with us performing. I think what we've got to deliver live is actually quite close to what we've done on the album. It's kind of unusual to be able to take that on tour with us.
I'm glad people are supporting the vision.
JR — So am I.