The Genre-Bending World of Juice and Their ‘Boy Story’

Photo Credit: Samuel David Katz

Juice, the Brooklyn collective, creates a unique genre-bending sound to communicate compelling storytelling visuals through their lyrical arrangements. The 7-piece outfit is composed of the talented Ben Stevens, Christian Rose, Daniel Moss, Kamau Burton, Michael Ricciardulli, Miles Clyatt, and Rami El-Abidin. In the creation of the group’s newest single, “Superimposed”, listeners can hear an energetic instrumental beat accompanied with the lyrics of one’s reality of another person leading into a darker complexity of the song. Juice tackles multiple themes throughout their new project including anxiety, self-doubt, self-growth, and a resurgence of their own childhood experiences which pushed them to uncover many emotional explorations. The band has turned their creative musical skills into a visual universe of the project, calling their new video series “Boy Story: Crisis in Parallel”. With a collection of new songs and a forthcoming project to arrive in the Fall, the Brooklyn-based band is set to head back on the road with their Boy Story tour in October 2021. You can watch the first episode of “Boy Story: Crisis in Parallel” here and watch the universe of Boy Story unfold.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Bring us back to the beginning, how did you all meet and start your journey as Juice?

[CHRISTIAN]: We were all freshmen at Boston College and we all wanted to have some sort of musical outlet at a school that was pretty liberal arts-focused. We then all met and started playing together, and we eventually started playing shows around Boston. We were inviting friends to the shows and it just kept growing and growing to playing shows outside of Boston. We were practicing a lot and playing more shows even further outside of Boston, I think by the end of college we played in Wisconsin which was the furthest we had played. We then finished school and from there we just started doing this full time. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: I just want to give you guys a huge congratulations on the announcement of your fall tour for “Boy Story” - that must feel pretty surreal that you can now finally perform all these songs you worked so hard on in front of a live audience. What’s that feel like?

[MICHAEL]: It’s cool because we’ve spent so much time recording and that has taken its own shape so when we play live obviously a lot of those components transfer over. But I think different stuff on the songs will shine live and especially on tour too, stuff will change. Getting to that stage of each of those songs is always exciting because it’s always different and sometimes it’ll be a lot like the recording and other times it’ll be totally different.

[MICHAEL]: The best part is having new music to play, not playing the old songs for the billionth time! 

[BEN]: There are two components to this. We played four shows this week which were awesome and weirdly tiring - but I felt like when we were on stage, there was a different and more full communicative energy with the fans and us. Everyone was just super happy to be there, and also just seeing your friends and your fans hear a new song played live for the first time - that look on their faces was fucking sick.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Since there are 7 of you, how do you find an even balance with each other and what does the writing or creative process look like?

[CHRISTIAN]: You know we’re all really good friends and we all respect each other super deeply and love each other so I think every single one of these guys has great ideas. I think it’s a rolling process of just listening and respecting each other and also being trusting in yourself too that your friends are going to listen to your ideas.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Can you walk us through your upcoming single “Superimposed”?

[CHRISTIAN]: The way our songs sometimes happen is occasionally one person will have a demo and it’ll be brought to the group. That’s sort of what happened this time. I had a demo on my computer, we were in Killington Vermont, and we had been working on a bunch of new songs. We were in this process of just demoing stuff, showing it to each other, and trying it out, and this is one of those songs. I just made it on my computer on Logic overnight and I showed it to the guys and everyone thought it was cool. We took this little Logic seedling of something and turned it into this really cool, alt-rock/pop thing. I think it has a lot of bright and upbeat sounds contrasted with the lyrics and I think it had a lot to do with how bad I was feeling initially when we were writing in Killington just because there was a lot of crazy stuff happening in the world. I think subconsciously, there was a desire to make something happy sounding but the lyrics are not like that at all.

[MICHAEL]: Christian is being humble right now but there’s a cool story about how he had the demo and he was locked away in his room for a little while, he then came out at night and plugged in the aux in the big monitor speakers and it ripped!

[UNPUBLISHED]: In the summer months of 2020, you wrote the majority of your songs for “Boy Story” - do you feel like the pandemic actually inspired you to keep pushing and create this project?

[MICHAEL]: I think a big thing, at least for me, was when we had our 2020 tour planned and it got canceled so we all just went home. We were home for probably three or four months, which is the longest time that we’ve ever spent away from each other in a very, very long time. When we all got back together it was just super exciting and we were refreshed. I don’t think the pandemic influenced any lyrical writing but it obviously influenced the way that our lives were working. There are also songs on this that were written even before that, there’s one that was written like three years ago or something but the rest of the songs pretty much all happened in 2020. I think it was a time for us to look at everything we have; here's what’s going on now, here are the opportunities that we have, given we’re not touring. Now we’re together, and we have all this time, so what can we do with it.

[UNPUBLISHED]: You turned your musical project into a creative visual space as well with the new video series titled “Boys Story: Crisis in Parallel” - can you walk us through this journey of building a whole universe around this project and the inspiration behind doing so?

[BEN]: There’s a story that exists within the project, whether or not if it’s explicit, there’s a feeling of our collective character that’s going through this “Boy Story” that we’ve created. We haven’t done many music videos before so this was a great opportunity.

[DANIEL]: I think one of the most interesting things is that there are a lot of different worlds in the videos. There are going to be several of them, and they’re all going to take a different shape, but they were all shot in the exact same place. They were all shot in a barn and we were like ‘okay, here we have this entirely blank slate, and we’ve done the project with the songs, now let’s create a world for each of these’. We started coming up with concepts that tied [the songs] together.

[MICHAEL]: I’d say the big thing with us creatively, is that everyone in this band has a tendency to really expand stories, characters, and universes. That’s a really united thing among all of us. I mean, like “Dicaprio”, that was a fun thing for us to call it because it embodies some of that swag that Leo has. As this is going to be a larger project we wanted to make something closer to an album. The “Boy Story” thing is sonically much looser, it’s more of a feeling. We wanted something that could be attached to that universe.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Is there a general, overarching theme presented in “A Boy Story”?

[MICHAEL]: I feel like we’re embracing some of our boyhood. A lot of this time too away from normal life, I think everyone felt this, but we descended into some of the things I was attached to at a young age that made me comfortable. You know, just sitting in bed watching movies or strumming your guitar for no particular reason, just because it’s there and gives you comfort. It’s funny because the title actually came into the universe a long time ago, I think that was before the pandemic. 

[CHRISTIAN]: It creates this meditation of blindness and personhood on just one level in the context of all the characters and the boys who are writing the music. You get some of that personal exploration of relationships and you also get a really cool lens of the things that make us unique. It’s the boy's perspective; you get a lot of relationship stuff, growing up and wrestling with his ego - there are all sorts of themes.

[UNPUBLISHED]: If you could choose any artist dead or alive to collaborate with, who would it be?

[DANIEL]: We could be like alright, Mozart, we got this song with three chords. Just have him do a little section here, and do your thing for a second!

[CHRISTIAN]: I’d like to work with Mike Dean or Lauryn Hill.

Make sure to follow Juice on Instagram and stream “Superimposed”!