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Photo: Stolen Besos (Maya)

It’s hard not to get a little boyish about how much this amazing duo comprised of Claire and India, has grown, fluttering our hearts with their personalized pop music since the top of the pandemic. Lately, Boyish's sound has evolved to include some early aughts influences, and the results are devilishly exciting. Wanting to dig into the duo's latest EP, Little Demon Boy, we reached out to take in how best to listen to their music, their friends and collaborators, and more. 

Ones To Watch: How's ‘Boyish’ doing since we last checked in?  

Boyish: We’re good! Right now we’re in Chicago about to start tour with Claud! That’s really all we’ve been doing the past four months, which has been amazing!

Love the new EP. What is Little Demon Boy all about? 

Little Demon Boy is written for our 17-year-old selves. We wrote it during our move to LA last year, a time when we felt really lost, and moving churned up a lot of buried emotions and memories. This EP deals a lot with addiction and losing people close to you.               

We’ve been loving some of the new sounds, especially the shoegaze melodies. How’d the EP come together?  

We were really inspired by 2000s rock bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes. Our goal was to make a rock EP, something big and angry that felt alive. We mostly produced the EP by ourselves in our home studio at first, and then worked with other people for literally the first time ever.

Any collaborations or features? Who produced the album? 

We collaborated with people for the first time ever on this EP, usually it’s just the two of us producing everything alone. We got to work with King Princess on “Kill Your Pain,” which was such a dream. We also worked with Jake, Whistler, and Decarlo from Hippo Campus on the song “Split Up.” That was also very surreal and cool, we admire them so much. We also recorded some live drums and bass with our friends Joey Hays and Megan Mahoney, and that just added so, so much, and beyond that, they’re both just crazy talented. We were just so lucky to be able to work with some of our actual idols on this EP, I really can’t wrap my head around it. 

How do you feel your sound has evolved or changed since Garden Spider? 

I feel like it’s changed a lot, as we’ve sort of learned how to be better producers and writers. I think for such a long time I hated Garden Spider, to me it was a huge failure at the time. But now I can look back on it, and see that we were really unafraid to experiment and didn’t hold back at all (sometimes to a fault ahaha), and I think if we take anything from Garden Spider it would be to try to keep that same energy and lack of fear. 

Can we expect more evolution of your style in the future? 

Little Demon Boy definitely opened up a sonic world for us. It’s probably the least pop EP we’ve worked on so far and it’s felt nice to explore where our ears want to go. A lot of times while making EPs it feels like each song needs to be a single, but now we’re starting to work on a full-length album and we’ve felt a lot of that pressure lift away. I’m really excited to see how we evolve going forward, and excited to work on this next chapter! 

Besides this excellent EP, what else should we be on the lookout for? 

We’re currently on tour until October! We’ve had a busy summer and are coming up to the end of basically five months of touring, and then once we’re back in LA we’ll be writing a ton of music! 

What's inspiring you right now outside of music? 

Claire’s gotten really into animal photography and lesbian sci-fi books. I’ve started doing some figure drawing classes, and I’ve been really into that! 

Suggested activity while listening to the new EP? 

Maybe riding a bike on a hot summer night. 

Who are your Ones To Watch? 

I’ve been listening to a lot of Superfan, I think they’re such an amazing producer and writer and I’m so excited to hear what else they have in store. Their music is entirely theirs, I could never mistake it for any other artist.

Boyish's Little Demon Boy is available now.