With millions of streams, a blossoming global fanbase and a knack for gleaming pop production, Arkansas duo joan are poised to become a very big thing. We caught up with the pair on the heels of their debut album superglue’s release to learn more about their home studio working methods and how they’ve cultivated organic fame

Photography: Jacob Ruth

Once the province of the chart-aimed, teenage pin-ups of the ’90s and 2000s, the brand of pop production of which Little Rock, Arkansas duo joan are masters is centred on big hooks, uplifting choruses, big beats and a spotless sheen. All of which can be said of the tracks on new album superglue, the pair’s debut album following a run of streaming-only singles which overshot expectations considerably, garnering over 150 million streams globally.

Unlike many of their inspirations, joan are deeply invested in not just writing a topline or two but carefully crafting every millisecond of their productions themselves. The two – vocalist, guitarist and keyboardist Alan Benjamin Thomas and drummer Steven Rutherford – primarily work from Alan’s home studio, and explain that while their sound might initially feel retro on first listen, their ambitions for joan are much bigger. “I think to some degree we’ve taken elements from past decades of music…”

“When we started joan, we started with the love of music that our parents grew up listening to that had been passed down to us. We grabbed a lot of elements of that just to kind of inspire it and put our own modern take on it. Hopefully the sound feels like it’s from the past but also from today,” Alan explains. “We’ve always kind of not been afraid to take certain sounds, like a Juno patch or something and start a song and seeing where it goes. We’ve let ourselves as artists and producers evolve from there. Now we can go wherever we feel like.”

Take me on

Joan’s origins can be traced back to Ouachita Baptist University which they both attended. As Steven recalls: “Alan was studying marketing, I was studying music. We were both in two different bands. We played some shows together. My band produced one of his band’s EPs. It kind of became obvious that both our bands would split as people were graduating and getting real jobs. Steven and I were kind of