The story so far...

The Junior Boys defy any easy equation of pop or dance, joining a long tradition of sonically rich pop that unites emotionally charged songcraft with experimental genres (eg - New Order, Beach Boys). Just as Luomo redefined house, mixing dub, electronica and vocals, this is breaks new ground for electro-pop, blending heart felt vocals with a production style that owes a debt to artists as varied as Timbaland, Todd Edwards, Fennesz and the Basic Channel school. In short, it reflects early 80s pop history back through the styles of contemporary dance. They formed somewhere around 1999 in Hamilton, Canada, the same town that brought us Manitoba and Kieran '4Tet' Hebden’s text label.

Junior Boys conception occurred with two events: first listening to Dem 2’s ‘Baby (you’re so sexy)’, causing them to say "Yo! this is the future of music" then hearing Sylvian/Sakamoto doing ‘Bamboo Houses’ prompting "Woah! THIS is the future of music"

A band was formed, originally a duo: Jeremy Greenspan and Johnny Dark, they began creating the sound that would reconcile these influences, creating exciting fresh pop music that is unapologetically synthetic, yet drenched with passion and feeling.

Years of collaboration followed and the resulting demo was duly sent out but after a heap of rejections and near misses they were resigned to being bedroom geniuses, too retro for the garage scene, too pop for the underground. After Johnny left the band to pursue other interests there didn't seem much point continuing. That was until KIN heard their demo at the end of 2002 and commissioned more work from the remaining member. Hooking up with his engineer, Matt Didemus, Jeremy began again, writing more material and pulling an album together.

The first release Birthday / Last Exit in october 2003, a four track ep with remix by Fennesz, brought them unanimous acclaim when it caught the attention of the burgeoning blog scene (a loose collective of music writers) who jokingly tagged them 'the greatest band you've never heard of'.High Come Down EP followed in February 2004 and word began to spread.

Which brings us to the album Last Exit, due for release on the 7th of June in the UK was recorded in Hamilton late 2004. And having developed a 'live' act they are performing a few key dates to showcase the album.

Hear the music · Read the reviews · Buy the album · Press information

- Dance Album of the Month

***** 5 stars - MOJO

- It's hard to believe there will be a better record than Last Exit released this year

***** 5 stars – UNCUT

- fifth highest rated album of the year with 87/100 average

METACRITIC

- its heights eclipse virtually all other music this year..

PITCHFORK 8.9/10

- New Order produced by The Neptunes, anyone? The first album of the 21st Century. Astonishing

CMU

- Brave new world of electro-pop

**** - Q MAGAZINE

- Beautiful dance flecked synthpop

**** - MIXMAG

- Junior Boys is such an astounding relief, boarding on rapturous in their melancholy

URB

- the Boys' combo of neutered soulboyisms and jiggy electronics gives the impression they could be the start of something new for indie rock

VILLAGE VOICE

- a truly excellent album, one of the best of 2004 so far

DUSTED 9/10

- suave debut album... synthesizes different iterations of electronica: dubby microhouse, old-fashioned new wave, futuristic R & B

NEW YORK TIMES

- a dreamy suite of bruise-tender electro and quicksilver soul

VICE

- one of the best albums that you will hear all year. Highly Recommended

OTHER MUSIC

- it’s hard to see how this group can go wrong in the future

STYLUS - 9.7 / 10

- a quietly revolutionary album. Within six months savvy producers will borrow and steal its innovations, changing the pop landscape for years to come. Few will realize where it started.

fast n bulbous 10/10

- create songs that bring echoes of the past yet take a step forward

Exploding Plastic 10/10

- Hard to imagine any other record this year that will inject so much life into pop music, or one that will give the underground as much inspiration and validity as this

BoomKat

- Kompletter Killer!

DE:BUG 5/5

- essential... a powerful drug

LES INROCKUPTIBLES

- a massive album that sees the wire's aesthetic meeting early 80s smash hits Album of the week

ROUGH TRADE

- ...suggest Talk Talk produced by Timbaland, Hall & Oates having a panic attack and a very sleepy Underworld.. Junior Boys' spectral vision of electronic pop is an understated, unpredictable delight

**** THE GUARDIAN

- a slow and cinematic road trip of a record; buy it yesterday.

ABSORB (album of the month / ep of the month x2 )

- this record is breathtaking...

MIAMI NEW TIMES

older reviews

- Junior Boy[s] continues to weave a beguiling kind of ghost pop that cross-breeds the unlikely strains of UK garage, Brian Wilson and hauntingly deconstructed dub techno with a twitchy grin, teasing the conventions of pop to the brink of collapse".

Jockey Slut Magazine - Jockey Slut

"the Luomo-versed Junior Boys have made two of 2003's best indie pop singles"

"...bleeding their songcraft into groove and rhythm, creating a delicate sculpture of broken dreams and beats".

8.5 / 10

Scott Plagenhoef - Pitchfork

"The Canadian electro-pop enigmas drift silently within radar range and grab us unsuspectingly by the nuts and hearts. Naïve lyrics and melodies wrapped in gauzy mystery, coming on like the bastard sons of Marc Almond and Maurizio. Check.".

Mike Carhart-Harris - Sleazenation

"21st century Aphex Twin".

Number 11 in Hot New Stars feature - MixMag

"Both 'Birthday' and 'Last Exit' pair quaint synthpop arpeggios with irregular rhythms more suggestive of contemporary R&B; the array of wiry analog tones highlights Greenspan's shadowy voice as though illuminating him in profile."

Philip Sherburne - The Wire

"Curiously alien, gloriously synthetic and quite, quite beautiful Canadian pop-hymns toughened up with urban ruggedness; vocals so lachrymose they literally drip with sadness; there’s a gaping silence BETWEEN the beats that sounds like a black-hole reversing on itself; what Scout Niblett would be doing if she had downed a pill containing the last 20 years of electronic music with a whiskey chaser; the need for speed? Junior Boys play parlour games with tempo: their rhythms sound like they are drifting backwards through snow, slow, slow, slowly."

Chris Houghton - Careless Talk Costs Lives

"...bring as much rhythmic inventiveness to the table as any producer in hip hop and garage combined; their insolence lies in incongruously combining it with glittering arctic romanticism."

Tim Finney - Skykicking

"Heirs to Timbaland and Sylvian, Junior Boys are equal parts emotive wistfulness and stop start stutter rhythms; a combination that's as unique yet natural as their ever so (slyly) generic name."

Kodwo Eshun - journalist / author of 'More Brilliant than the Sun'

Unexpectedly, unaccountably, Pop has a future....

Mark Fisher - K-punk

"think crickets on quaaludes filmed on Super8 and then run backwards through a Speak 'n Spell".

Leslie Gilotti - Play Louder

"...neon world outside, trying to make sense out of the shapes beyond the window, rerunning the last few hours, trying to recapture those moments when you felt immortal just because you were dancing without feeling selfconscious to the greatest song you'd ever heard and you forgot to ask the DJ what it was…. poised between nausea and insanely profound thoughts, the faint strain of some local FM station fading in and out beneath the cabbie radio banter sounding like the most poignant soundtrack... and that's what Junior Boys sound like. Listening to Junior Boys and reading k-punk on their spectral roadmusic. It conjures up an essential part of clubbing rarely mentioned: the taxi home. Back to the early 80s for my anecdotal ramblings: post-Phonographique drunk, forlorn, battered by aural hallucinations and abandoned by friends. Mind on early 20s overdrive. Aching with unrequited love for just about any goth nymphet who'd displaying the right mix of stockingtop and distain and gone off with some Kirkgate fishmonger with a rockabilly quiff. Sprawled alone in the back of a cab watching the ghostly....".

Nigel Richardson - Yes/No Interlude

notes by K-punk (mark fisher)

How to describe the Junior Boys?


Elegantly refurbished synthpop, 2-step denuded of R and B's presence .... Jewel-glittering irridescent electro....

Dem 2, Luomo, OMD, Steely Dan, Hall and Oates, Talk Talk: who would have made any connections between these bands until they heard the Junior Boys? The Junior Boys reveal previously unsuspected complicities and affinities amongst their precursors. They are custom-built to illustrate the concept 'uneasy listening' - the unsettling of MOR, ambient and Pop. Make no mistake: for all their rhythmic inventiveness, the Junior Boys’ songs are great Pop, much catchier than anything you are likely to hear on the charts this or any other week.


As with all great Pop, it’s a question of seduction and addiction. Hear their songs once, and they are under your skin. Hear them again, and you’re hooked. They are part of your nervous system, a soundtrack to your craving.

Not that the Junior Boys’ sound like much else on the current Pop landscape. The Jbeez are dissenters from Now Pop’s striplit presence, even if they are utterly contemporary. Junior Boys' vocals are the opposite of full-on: emptied out, emaciated, exhausted. On second thoughts, 'exhausted' doesn't quite capture their quality. Jeremy's is a very, very late night voice, certainly, and these are very, very late night songs. But it is not so much exhausted as on the cusp between waking and sleep, in that state where you are tired enough to relinquish the everyday, but awake enough to want to defer falling into unconsciousness. It's that state - where vulnerability, openness, reflectiveness, calm, anxiety, bliss, blend and blur - that is the Junior Boys' signature affect.


And so many of the songs seem like emotions translated into dreams, or the mind recalling a day's (daze) events as it succumbs to dream, or emotions from a dream being recalled. Dreamotions....


The JBs sound like a city at night: each song exploring terrain as feeling, feeling as terrain. Dub House(s), the borders and bridges, highways and highrises of Calvinoesque semi-visible cities ... Full of SPACE, everything here is here to emphasise the gaps; that dub paradox, a sorcerous formula which the Junior Boys understand much better than many more literal(istic) would-be dubsters, those who think that turning up the bass and turning down the vocals is ENOUGH....when dub is about re-defining what COUNTS as enough, about (need)LESSNESS.... Junior Boys' (2-step) (heart) beats punctuate time irregularly (mark an irregular Time) just so as to open up space, spaces...


Fall into them.