Before they became Boyish, the duo of India Shore and Claire Altendahl made alt-country songs while studying at Berklee College of Music. Upon graduating, their sound evolved into grittier coming-of-age tales — becoming its most realized with their long-awaited debut album, Gun, out Sept. 12 via R&R (home to Mk.gee, Dijon, and Racing Mount Pleasant).
The world of Gun exists in a made-up town, fueled by Twin Peaks binges and bedridden delirium after Shore broke her leg in a surfing accident. Yet it’s just as grounded in the surreal encounters they’ve had while traveling through “middle-of-nowhere USA” in the past few years. “A lot of weird stuff has happened to us on tour,” Altendahl tells AP. “Right before we started writing Gun, we were at a rest stop in Wyoming on top of this mountain, and I saw this woman with a huge magical staff follow us into the bathroom. But India never saw her, even though they would have been standing right next to each other, and claimed there was no woman in the bathroom with us. However, I remember her looking at me and winking before walking on.”
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As with Twin Peaks, though, the story is secondary. Through eccentric characters and dreamlike scenes (their last video, inspired by Jumbo’s Clown Room in Hollywood, feels caught in a liminal space as the band perform in front of a dancer), Boyish curate a brooding atmosphere, wanting listeners to “feel like they’re stepping into a physical place, a self-contained world, and know by the time the last song ends, something in the town has changed forever.” It’s a far stranger, more unsettling era of Boyish, their first project made without laptops. Alongside producer Loren Humphrey (Cameron Winter, Lana Del Rey), the pair recorded to 2-inch tape over two months in Tuxedo Park, New York, laying down their best takes after loading up on doughnuts from their local Dunkin’.
True to its name, “BIG” is another quantum leap from their alt-country roots. There are grunge-y guitars, pummeling drums, and strings (performed by Jesse Kotansky) that intertwine with Shore’s featherlight voice. Its video, directed by Ben Turok and premiering below, pulls us out into the country. Filmed in upstate New York, it features the duo staring into a volcanic bonfire — a scene that wasn’t originally on the call sheet. It plays out like a 3 a.m. dissociation, where the flames feel just as consuming as those massive guitars.
Gun pulls us into a much darker, theatrical space. I’ve never heard Boyish sound like this. What motivated you to go in that direction? What was on your mood board?
We wanted the album to feel like a physical place you could go when you listened. We were watching a lot of Twin Peaks and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
What were some of your rituals when you were in the studio with Loren Humphrey?
When we were recording up in Tuxedo Park with Loren, it was over a five-mile walk into town, so we forced him to take us to Dunkin’ Donuts every morning because we love their iced coffee. He denies it, but I think he likes their Munchkins even more than we do. After we would fill up on doughnuts, we would record our best takes, so there was something special going on with that Dunkin’.
“BIG” is appropriately titled. Those guitars feel so consuming, but they hit such a sweet spot. Tell me how the song came together.
“BIG” was the first song we wrote for this album. It was written faster than most of the stuff on this record. We hadn’t written anything for a couple of months because we were on tour most of the summer. We had a vision of a super simple drum fill starting off the first song on the album and then having huge guitars come in right after. We recorded most of it at Diamond Mine studio in Long Island City to 2-inch tape before finishing it up in Tuxedo Park. One of our favorite moments was when the strings came together at the end. They were performed by Jesse Kotansky.
The video captures you both staring into this towering bonfire in the country. It’s pretty terrifying in scale.
The fire wasn’t originally planned. We were shooting on this huge farm, and the owner really wanted to light this huge wood pile on fire. We couldn’t say no to such a kind offer, so he doused the thing in gasoline and lit it, and it looked like a volcano ’cause it took a while for the fire to move from the top of the pile to the base. But honestly, the whole experience felt very Gun and surreal because it was so random and so extreme that we had to laugh. It was the biggest fire we had ever seen, and we didn’t know what to do with it ’cause it was so overwhelming, but after seeing the film back, we were like that’s perfect for “BIG” ’cause the only word that comes to mind when you look at it is “big.”
What challenges did you deal with while making the video?
We shot two nights in a row from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. It was during a massive heatwave in NY, so it was 100 degrees out. Then our director Ben Turok told us to stand in front of that huge fire, so it got even hotter out. I remember going to bed that morning, and I would feel flashes of heat across my face like I was still looking at the flame. That, or I was in menopause.