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We've been waiting for a record that really has us trying to bridge how we feel with what we're thinking: a healthy destructive, a chaotic medicine that makes it feel a bit sick to feel a bit better. On their debut album, Cold Court fills that gap perfectly, and rips down the genre wall, rendering this an album that is inherently a statement. For a debut it’s ambitious, full of ruckus song structure with unpredictable melody & lyrics that had us pausing and rewinding in this era of skip. It is an internet-sounding album, with jazz interludes book-ended by punk dance, spying into your soul for youthful vigor, and releasing it in enviable energy. We were enthralled and reached out to the sibling duo who create the richest of the sounds, opening a wormhole of answers for you to revel in:

OnesToWatch: Why are you guys artists? Why are you a band? 

Jojo: Because we love it, I guess. It feels like it's our purpose. 
I feel like we've tried doing lots of things. We do lots of things. But there's a feeling I get, a fulfillment that I feel from making art more than anything. It makes me feel alive. 

It's good to feel alive. 


Jojo: Very good to feel alive, for sure. 

You guys maybe had some genetic cheat codes, but how did the band come together? 

Jojo: Mini and I have always been making music together. But aside from that, in high school, a friend of mine was a drummer and we were just jamming and we had the idea of starting a guitar band with my friend. We were really inspired by Boris and My Bloody Valentine, super noisy, rock stuff. JoJo started jamming with Toby and then it became clear we needed to start a band. We already had a drummer on lock.

Mini: He also had access to a warehouse through his dad’s staging company. 

Jojo: We also worked for that company. It was tough work, but worth it for the warehouse. We did sound for a few festivals. 

Mini: But after that, Jojo went to college in Philly and our drummer, Toby went to college in Milwaukee. 


Jojo: Then it became Cold Court, Gen 2, with Jett, Charlie, Theo. We tried a bunch of other people too. We were a seven-piece at one point. We had sax, viola, percussion.
It was a lot for what we were doing. And then Theo, our bassist, had to go to the U.K. Now we're currently in the state where it's just me, JoJo, Charlie's still around, and we have a new drummer, Josh.

You guys are like Spinal Tap. You're losing drummers left and right, you know? 

Jojo: There definitely is a curse. 


I love that answer. Given you had a sax and viola player initially, how different is the band now from its inception? Because the sound now definitely does not have sax or viola. Was it initially just a collection of friends jamming, or did you have a different vision? 

Mini: At first, it was definitely collecting friends. When we first started the band, it was just me and JoJo. We made a song in FL studio. We’d always just been following a stream of consciousness.You know, we have a friend that plays viola, that’s gotta be in the band. We were kind of a “no wave” band, especially because we mostly only played shows, rather than recording music. We wrote music, but it was all live, so it greatly influenced how we wrote. It was all energy-based. Like our first song, “Twin,” it's all diminished chords. There's really no harmony at all. It's all just noise. It's in your face. But now it's very different because we've been playing shows for a bit and wanted to actually record. Once we started taking songs to the studio, we really had to think about things outside the performance. Now we were producing in Ableton, and it was so much more electronic. We hadn’t explored that yet, simply because it wasn’t accessible to us. But as we continued on, and lost members, the electronic aspects became so helpful. We started playing with a 404 sampler, and that influenced us to start going heavy into computer music. Now we pretty much just play with computers. 


Do you guys have a writing process, given the enormous evolutions in terms of production, composition, songwriting, and members?

Mini: There's definitely a process, which came from the way that we worked stream of consciousness, letting everything flow before. Now our method is definitely just collecting sounds, collecting performances, capturing ideas and then remixing and remixing and remixing. After we’ve got it to where there's pretty much four or five different versions of the same song, we bounce them all to audio and put them all on top of each other and then play them all at once and try to find where the song really is within all of these versions.

Jojo: With the vocal performances, we leave it in the booth, whatever you get in there is what makes it to the record. A lot of vocal takes are from us playing live. Our sound has definitely come from the fact that there's a hundred bounces, at least, of every song on EP. It all comes together to make the final song. There’ll be sounds from the first demo that we made on a laptop in the car. 

It sounds like you guys have two processes. You have this production, laptop-based process, and then you also just jam and take things from live, and then combine them. That could account for your interesting sound. On this upcoming project specifically, when you were putting together the collection of songs, how did you choose which ones would be on this EP?

Mini: When it came to the EP, we were really desperate to say something and finally release music, so we wanted to write every kind of song. It’s all over the place, but there's a theme. In every song, everything breaks. Everything is destroyed. In songs like, “81,” where the outro is really groovy and open, that’s the peaceful version of getting destroyed. But then in other songs, it’s the brutal side of things, where you’re being thrown into the sun at the speed of light. The theme is pain, and electronics in our process, and what doing this means to us. 

Were there songs you left out? 

Jojo: We had a different project before this that got scrapped. 

Mini: It was very riff-based, very bluesy. 

Jojo: I guess spiritually, this project is a little bluesy, but the project before was a bit more on the nose. 

Mini: Lots of guitar solos... and then we realized we got to cut that shit out. Maybe it’ll come back if Jojo’s had enough to drink. 

I like this tight sound, but I am curious about that project. Um, The bluesy version or whatever, you know? 


Mini: We were talking about doing a live version of the EP, because the studio version and live version are very different. We get to present it however we are most confident. 

Love it. Do you have any ambitions for this EP? Is there something you're trying to achieve or lay the foundation for in terms of building an audience or a sound? 


Mini: Definitely. We want to build an audience, establish ourselves as artists to look out for. We really want to make an album. And we really want to go on tour. We just want to make more art. My biggest hope is that this EP just gives us more opportunities to keep doing that on bigger, bigger scales, for more people. 

Jojo: And also, I feel like the sound of the EP and the sound that we're trying to achieve, I think there's other people out there that are approaching the same golden medium, that balance that we're trying to shoot for. I would hope at least that kids like us would see that and hear our story through these very familiar sounds that we all grew up on.

What did you guys grow up on?

Jojo: Nina Simone, but also Skrillex. The classics. 

That’s a spectrum. 

Mini: The first band that me and Jojo really bonded over was Black Midi. When we started listening to Schlagenheim together, it kind of clicked, whatever we were going to do, it had to be weird. Unapologetically us. 

Jojo: All that new rock weirdness from a few years ago was super inspiring, because it was also playing on the same kind of concepts that we grew up listening to, like Skrillex and Lil Uzi Vert, Playboy Cardi. That was the first show you went to right? 

Mini: Not the first show I went to, but I went to Lil Uzi Vert for my 12th birthday, and it was the first show I asked to go to, and I was blown away. He’s one of my favorite rappers. Also Dead Mouse, so many more. 

Good stuff. 
I'm going to pivot to some more fun questions for you. When you are at your most zen, most peaceful state, what are you doing and where are you? 

Jojo:
Either I am playing music, live, jamming, or I'm listening to an album. Or on a walk. 

Mini: When it's really, really early in the morning, and the sun hasn't risen yet, and I'm walking, either listening to music or skating, that’s my most peaceful. 


Love it. Since you have had as many as seven people in a band, feeding bands is always a skill set. When everyone’s hungry, who cooks and what do you guys cook? 


Mini: I've cooked for the band. Jojo cooks, our mom sometimes cooks. Shoutout mom.
She makes really good Filipino food, adobo, sinigang, spaghetti. Especially in the mixing sessions, we were relying on that, eating a lot of that stuff. 

Jojo: When we were really desperate, we used to make pancakes for the band. 


Mini: We eat pancakes more than probably any other food. 

Nothing wrong with that. If you could play anywhere, with anyone, anytime, dead or alive, do you have a dream venue and billing? 

Mini: No one's asked us that before. Maybe Central Park, free show. I want to play with… 

Jojo: I would say Sun Ra, at least. 

Mini: Some blues people like Stevie Ray Vaughan. 


Jojo: I'm thinking Justice, that was the first thing that came up. 


That's a lineup.
If you could be anywhere, celebrating a big occasion, birthday, life things, what would you be doing? Where would you go? 

Jojo: We would be home probably, right? 

Mini: Ice cream…

Jojo: We would be getting Szechuan in Chinatown in Philly. That's the best place. We can email it to you. 

I’d love a non-music and a music recommendation. 

Mini: My non-musical recommendation is to watch the play Sunday in the Park With George. Life changing. 

We don't get a lot of play recs. 

Mini: I love plays, I want our shows to be very theatrical at some point. 

Jojo: We're shooting for that. 

Mini: Music rec, lately, I've been listening to a lot of Deerhoof. Time Skip by Emo Rave, it’s an EP. 

Jojo: Non-music recommendation, my brain is going towards a movie, on Criterion Channel, there's a series of Sun Ra short films about his band and journey. I also recommend these YouTube Shorts of someone making MS Paint animations, it’s beautiful, absurdist stuff. His name is Pilot Red Sun. Creepy MS Paint videos. For music recommendations, we all really like the band YHWH Nailgun. 

Last thing, I’d like to end on your words. 

Mini: It's important to remember. And if you forget, try and remind yourself. It's okay to forget, but just remind yourself. 

Jojo: I'll tell people what I would tell myself: go outside and touch grass, take a walk, take deep breaths before you eat. And listen to our music. 

Thank you both so much, this was awesome. 

Cold Court: Thank you!