Introducing East London’s Politically Charged Alternative Band… Boy Bleach

Made up of two sets of brothers – Lou and Jimi & James and Nick – and their best friend JJ, the East London-based band Boy Bleach splashed onto the music scene in 2021 with their single ‘Perplexed.’ Since their debut, the group has taken music listeners on an immersive journey, releasing songs that explore topics like love, heartbreak and the pressure of growing up in a fast-moving, anxiety-inducing world.  

In 2024, Boy Bleach has continued to peel back the layers of their dynamic artistry with their unapologetic tracks ‘England,’ ‘Sun Cream’ and ‘Blood Honey.’ Backed by alt-rock/punk productions and tongue-in-cheek lyrics, their latest singles offer a sneak peek into their upcoming EP, The Beautiful Blue – which has been described as “a scathing punk-infused takedown of the social, political and economic state of the UK today.”

In an additional statement, Jimi teased: “The EP is like our skin in the sun. But it’s burnt, peeling skin. The Beautiful Blue feels like promise, it’s the complexity of hoping and dreaming. It’s the vastness of the sky, and that seemingly unshakeable faith in the excess of the world. But on the day you found out Santa is bullshit.” Ahead of The Beautiful Blue‘s 21 November release, we were able to chat with Boy Bleach about their music beginnings, their music goals and more. Read our full interview with the band below.

Heya Boy Bleach! Thank you for sitting down with Spindle. How’s 2024 been treating you? Did you guys have a good summer?  

Thank you for having us! In all honesty, this year has been a fucking shit show mate, what chaos. But we are feeling good and hungry to end it in the same tumbling down-the-stairs fashion we’ve approached the beginning of the year with.

Let’s dive right into it! When did you each have your “ah-ha” moment that set you down the music path?  

Jimi: I mean, I personally can’t remember the actual moment music became a thing for me; it’s just always been there. Our Dad fancied himself a bit of a musician before we were born, so we always had a couple of usable synths in the house, and a few good songs stuck in the air. But I was always more interested in the words. I loved writing, and the words that always moved me the most were those accompanied by music. I think ‘Judas’ by Depeche Mode was the earliest memory of me listening to music and actually hearing the words and thinking, “Yeah, this is beautiful”, in the back of the car driving through Walthamstow to my primary school with my Mum, shout out Mum. From then on, I wanted to write songs. I actually used to tell people I played the drums before I actually learnt because I wanted to be a musician so bad, and the chances of there being drums around were slim when you’re at a random mate’s house. There are some songs I wrote at about like 9 or 10 years old on the back of a paper plate at the local working men’s somewhere around our house. Maybe we’ll release those at some point.  

Nick: Mine was our first show. We were just messing about prior to that, seeing what we could do and pass some time. We’d been doing cover gigs and pubs on New Years/student nights, so it just felt logical to play The Water Rats with no tunes written. We stuck our heads down for a couple of days and wrote a whole set of original tracks, rehearsed for an hour before the show, and the 27 people in the audience in King’s Cross that night didn’t know what hit em. I wondered, “If we didn’t get booed that night, with songs that shite, imagine if we actually tried” and tried we did. That was the moment I felt we could really do this.

Louis: I failed literally all my A-Levels… actually I got an E in photography, which is a pass, I swear? But anyway, I failed nearly everything in my first year of college. I didn’t really give a shit about the subjects I was doing, and it showed. After that, I had to make a decision to retake everything or to change courses, and I decided to do whatever I could to make music the only thing I had to do with my time because it was basically the reason I flopped in the first place. It became a thing of necessity for me, it was basically the only thing I could do, and fortunately, it was the thing I loved more than anything.

JJ: I grew up in a family of musicians back on my island. I was just around gigs as a kid all the time, at about 6 or 7 years old. I saw my Dad perform to maybe 500 people, and the connection he had with the crowd stayed with me. From that day, I started chasing a connection that I could only find in and around music.

Was there a specific artist or record that fueled your creativity?

I mean, musically, our band has got such a mixed bag of inspiration. We love all sorts of artists for different reasons, and everything tickles our fancy one way or another. The artists who reinvented themselves in every era to stay creative and relevant, like Bowie and Miles Davis, and purists like Prince, who always put their obsession with creating the best music before everything else. The records that inspired us to pick up our instruments in the first place were the Thin Lizzys, Good Charlottes, and the Bon Ivers. The people from our side of the city who held the torch were like Kano. There are so many sick artists that have soared recently that feel super authentic and make us wanna work harder; Little Simz, IDLES, Fontaines D.C., the list could go on forever. Sorry, that’s quite long-winded – I think we all find it really hard when asked to be so definite in a response because the weave of artists or records that gave us a sense of purpose or sparked that drive to create is a long one that gets added to every day. Most of our inspiration, or fuel, just comes from the most normal shit. People we love. Pain we feel. Things that worry us. People being c**ts. Whatever you can name. Everything, one way or another, fuels us as artists.  

Can you take us through the creation of Boy Bleach? How did you five end up linking up?

We are related by blood mostly. Lou and I have been brothers since birth. He went on to meet Nick in college when they were 16, and the three of us started writing songs together. They were mad shit, so then Nick brought his brother James in to play guitar for us, which didn’t improve much, but we had a laugh, and then Lou went on to fail all of his A-levels and meet JJ at the same college he met Nick at. A few months later, we all went down to a local rehearsal room to meet as a group for the first time, jammed together for a couple of hours and Boy Bleach was born, but with a much worse name. From that day, we were absolutely sure we were gonna do this together, and we just haven’t gotten around to the part where you give up.

We have to talk about your alt-rock sound. First of all, it exudes such fun and electric energy. It’s absolutely fantastic! How would you all personally describe the inner workings of the band’s sound?

Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. We change our approach to writing basically with every song; the sound is just us. We actually struggle to define it ourselves, but it just feels like Boy Bleach. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s a feeling, not a sound. An attitude, not a dress code. Do you know what we mean?

You four recently released your track ‘Sun Cream,’ which is an inspirational banger. Can you take us through the creative process and inspiration for the record?

We were in a proper rut writing-wise. We’d just left our label and had taken a bit of a beating creatively that year. For what felt like the first time since we’d started writing, we actually didn’t know what we wanted to say. We’d been exceptionally outspoken and pretty critical and direct with the rest of the tracks on this project, so we were feeling the pressure of the blank we were drawing. But like most things, if you pull from the honesty of the moment, you usually come away feeling pretty good about what comes out of it. We took inspiration from being in the fattest rut. The lack of inspiration or success. The constant battle for inspiration and purpose. Being broke as shit. Literally, everything that was going on at the time added some substance to this track. Lou and I went down to some town near Brighton to write and purge some of the negative shit we were feeling at that point, and lyrically the track just unfolded. We took what we had back to the lads and got stuck in, and because the track felt quite unorthodox, we approached it with a bit more freedom and whimsy than we had been recently, pulling some sleep-deprived overnight sessions to get a bit freaky and disconnected. Definitely helped.

Will we be getting a music video for the single?

Nah unfortunately not this time – we’re pretty DIY at the moment and our other jobs are pretty full on – so focusing on pulling together the best music and world we can without selling all of our shit is a priority. We’ve got loads of visual ideas that we’re itching to see materialise though and we are working on it!

We know you guys just dropped ‘Sun Cream,’ but can we expect a debut album or an EP soon?

Yeah for sure! Our second EP, ‘The Beautiful Blue” is looking like an early Christmas present. We reckon we’ll put it out in November. Feels like a good month for it.

We hear Boy Bleach headlining a show at The Underworld. What can fans expect from your upcoming performance?

Come with low expectations and you will not be disappointed! Nah, we’re kidding, our new stuff has been written for live – it’s like a dirty, dark, sweaty underground party. Anyone who’s been to our shows know it’s just a different level to the record. The music is bigger, the band have been pounding the treadmill. I know everyone says this to sell their live shows but it is genuinely chaos, and usually not planned. Everything that can go wrong will, but everything that should go right goes fucking right.

Lastly, what are five goals you want to achieve as a band over the next five years?

We actually got asked this a few years ago and I think we knocked a couple off but we overshot by a fair margin! With that being said, we’ve only ever really had one goal; we wanna be happy with the art we’re making, or as close to fully satisfied as we’ll allow ourselves to be. If we get a few main stages and bang a number 1 album in here and there well that’s just lovely innit. And quitting our day jobs wouldn’t hurt so we’ll sneak that on there. Thank you for having us, Spindle!

Make sure to check out Boy Bleach’s latest releases here or below.