It has been onward and upwards for Aussie electronica duo Boo Seeka since they released their debut single ‘Kingdom Leader’ in January 2015 – a tune that was written just days after the pair met each other for the very first time.
“I’m probably 90 per cent excitement, 10 per cent nerves. I reckon Boo is the opposite,” producer Sammy Seeka, half of the band, laughs. “But we are super excited for [the album] to come out, we can’t wait. It’s been a while for us and we’re super proud of it. There’ll be people, of course, that don’t like it and that’s fine, we’re not trying to please everyone. We’re just trying to create music that we love.”
Within the first year of starting their mutual musical journey, Seeka and vocalist Boo released two strong singles, played all over Australia and toured Europe twice.
“We played a festival called Surfana Music Fest, in the sand dunes south of Amsterdam, in June of our first year,” Seeka recalls. “It had only been four months since Boo and I met and we were on the other side of the world and they’re singing our songs back to us at this festival.”
Check out the video for the single ‘Does This Last’ from Boo Seeka’s debut LP, Never Too Soon:
Now, almost two and a half years later, they have released six singles in total and are finally ready to release their debut album, Never Too Soon.
“When we started this thing, we were writing songs and we were happy with them and they were going well, but as time went on we became greater perfectionists. Things that were good enough then, weren’t good enough anymore,” Seeka explains. “But this year we finally started smashing out some stuff that we’re super happy with and yeah, we got it done – better late than never.”
The duo has toured pretty much non-stop from the beginning, and though it has obviously prolonged the process of finishing the debut, it has never hindered their creativity.
“Pretty much all of our ideas would start on the road because that’s where we spend most of the year, whether it’s in Europe or America or Australia,” says Seeka. “So that’s where we spend most of our time together, that’s when things are coming to us and we’re writing them down or quickly recording them on an iPhone or pulling out the laptop and recording something that we’re doing at the time.”
It had only been four months since Boo and I met and we were on the other side of the world and they’re singing our songs back to us.
Upon returning home to Sydney, they would continue working on those ideas before finishing the tunes in producer Ian Pritchett’s garage studio. The biggest obstacle for the pair has really been knowing when a song was actually done.
“We finally figured out how we work best together and literally it took almost two and a half years,” Seeka explains. “The album was largely done in my bedroom where we would open a couple of bottles of red wine and just sit there at night and write and play and just have fun with it. And if we hit a road block, then we would just move straight on to something else. I think that was the biggest key for us: knowing when to move on to something else. We didn’t do that before and I think that’s why we were finally able to finish some songs. And the album.”
There will be a few of the well-known Boo Seeka tracks on Never Too Soon, but the record mostly consists of new material.
“A lot of the songs were written fairly recently,” Seeka shares. “There’s a couple of songs on there about specific, isolated instances or people and then there’s a bulk of songs that we wrote in the past few months that are about a relationship Boo was having and the road that took. When it ended, he was obviously feeling a lot of emotions and it really sparked his creativity, and that’s when we knuckled down and kicked out a lot of songs. So a lot of them, like ‘Does This Last’, the second last single, and ‘Turn Up Your Light’, the single we just put out, are based around that.”
We like to paint a picture and put people in it musically, take people somewhere where they can shut their eyes and for three or four minutes just not be where they currently are.
When asked to define the Boo Seeka sound, Seeka hesitates a bit. “It’s never an easy question to answer because it’s constantly changing and we have never been able to pinpoint it. I suppose I could drag in elements of the musicality or I could describe what it does to me or to other people when you listen to it, and so I would say that it’s quite dreamy, it’s quite poppy, it’s quite electronic. It’s pretty hip hoppy. We like to paint a picture and put people in it musically, take people somewhere where they can shut their eyes and for three or four minutes just not be where they currently are.”
The duo will be embarking on a massive national tour, hitting 18 venues around the country in October and November.
“We can’t wait for it, we love touring Australia. We have a more established following here so the shows are bigger and we have a lot of friends that come out when we’re around the country. Our mantra when it comes to touring Australia is to go wherever people want to come to a show. There’s a hundred thousand places and little towns that you can play in this country, so why not do it?”
Never Too Soon is out now through Sureshaker.
