With their debut album, dream-rock four-piece Junodream set out on an odyssey through space, sound and humanity.

Words: Finlay Holden.
Photos: Barney Curran.

From their adopted home of London, space-rock quartet Junodream have steadily etched their name in the music scene since adopting their moniker in 2018. Their monumental debut album, 'Pools Of Colour,' juxtaposes human emotion with the vast expanse of space, marking a significant stride forward six years in the making.

Initially exploring various musical paths, the band eventually honed a more defined direction by sharpening their craft as a unit. "We needed a fresh band identity," recalls singer Ed Vyvyan of those early days. "A new name, music we're truly proud of; thoughtful, considered and deliberate rather than impulsive creations formed from anything that came out of our guitars and mouths."

Guitarist Dougal Gray adds that they "gained thick skin and learned what we really wanted to do by doing a lot of stuff that we didn't." With an extreme dose of potentially deluded passion, the group set forth a new vision that only their close collaboration would enable. "We feel like brothers or even a four-way marriage. Maybe both?"

Junodream began as a DIY endeavour out of necessity, and that attention to detail has helped them curate a holistic and fleshed-out universe in which their artistic entity can reside. "We've always been in the trenches, taking control as much as we can," Dougal says. "At the end of the day, it's always down to our ideas and dedication. Not solely within the music, but everything around it as well."

With guitarist Tom Rea educating himself to become production lead, the band were empowered to steer their recording into new areas of discovery, and 2021's 'Travel Guide' EP offered an excellent example of their self-sufficient abilities. With 'Pools Of Colour', though, Junodream recruited Simon Byrt to add a new level of urgency to their "cross-shed" record. "We do think about stuff a lot, and when you overthink things, it can inhibit moments of magic. Simon was great at refining our specificity without losing spontaneity."

Stand-out single 'Death Drive' demonstrates the enchanting work of all involved parties and quickly introduces multiple themes that will twist and turn across the album. "It talks about a wide open space, i.e. Earth, but then focuses on a kid getting angry at you for getting their McDonald's order wrong. The duality of that is so bizarre," Ed points out. "We are floating in nothingness, yet there are these people who are determined to make someone else's life a living hell. There is conflict in every corner of our planet, and it's weird how that stuff has come to fruition so heavily in the last couple of years."

"It happens on every level," Dougal chips in. "From backrooms of the internet to full-scale conflict, there is this horrible destructive thing in all of us that seems to be manifesting alongside the rise of technology in the 21st century. This is one dystopian, doom-running universe." It's not exactly the happiest of tunes, then, but the groove it brings lets listeners shake off that pent-up frustration.

The ten-tracker offers a fascinating balance of broad, existential topics ('Fever Dream', 'Pools of Colour') alongside finely detailed personal stories ('The Beach', 'Happiness Advantage'), with some tracks miraculously managing to combine both ('Sit In The Park'). The zoom setting constantly shifts, but far from dizzying the LP's through line, it conjures a distinct pastiche of wholly human questions and weaves a tapestry of deep introspection.

"Depending on what scale you're thinking about something, the amount that you care becomes more intense, or the amount that it's significant melts away," Ed elaborates, using the record's penultimate offering as a sample. "'Lullaby' is about being stuck in your bedroom in London - you can hear everything going on outside, and it's really affecting you because of the tightness of that context, the small space you're in. 'The Oranges' expands more into pondering-the-universe territory, so it has to be matched sonically as well. 'Lullaby' is tight and dry, 'The Oranges' is the opposite."

Total thematic and sonic synchronicity makes for a cohesive and transformative journey, with the first lyric wiping the slate clean ("This is a new day"), the aforementioned lullaby putting you – hopefully metaphorically – to sleep before the album closer spirals inside lucid dreams that represent a newfound state of being.

In particular, Ed describes that tune as "a congruence of all that we talk about on the record. In lucid dreams, you're in a tight physical place, but the possibilities are infinite, and you completely transcend the issues you've faced elsewhere. Nothing matters. Where you might seem insignificant in other areas, you become fully significant in the dream world."

Such a broad but simultaneously in-depth examination of modern life is a step up from even the finest of Junodream's previous ambitions, and the focused thought behind it is apparent. "We decided to take stock of where we are in the world through a couple of different lenses," Ed shares. "Spatial, societal, and emotional. Things are hurtling at a million miles an hour, and looking at the news, you see AI revolutions, medical breakthroughs, and events unrelated to and frankly beyond most people's day-to-day experiences."

"We're talking about how weird things have become. Does an ant know what a motorway is? Probably not. Equally, do we know what's going on around us on a societal and spatial level? Probably not, either. That knowledge gap is spiralling out of control. This record is about finding the daisies growing through the concrete. Even though everything looks grey, if you look close enough, there are pools of colour."

Although Junodream do touch on the darker aspects of life, acknowledging shared anxieties is a point of reference for other people to relate. "We're not telling people to look at all the bad parts of the world; we just want people who do see them to know that they're not alone. I feel a sense of overwhelming doom quite often, but when you put these ideas into a song and see what people resonate with, it makes you feel less isolated as well. We're helping people to identify why they might feel insignificant."

This four-piece have clearly put considerable emphasis on writing and recording this batch of material, but out of the last few years has arisen a strong desire to build a tangible community that exists in the flesh, not only on the internet. By hosting a "meet-and-greet slash art installation slash piss-up" in London, Junodream have started doing precisely that, and their upcoming UK tour aims to deliver on this promise.

"The album is partially commenting on a lack of connection between people, and that's something we want to act against more and more," Ed declares. "That's crucial when there are so many artists online, 100,000 songs being added to Spotify every day. When you spend money on a CD or vinyl, you've committed to liking this artist, and you can take some ownership over that, but that's dissipated when you pay for all music ever with a tenner. We have to create our own ways to connect with each other now."

"We want everything we put out there to build on the idea of the band; it should add to the character of Junodream. It's a pain to be more deliberate with each move to develop that cohesion, but putting in that effort makes that more of an enjoyable journey instead of listening to a bunch of boring blokes on a stage somewhere."

"You've got to think about art as holistically as possible," Dougal says. "If you apply that to every touchpoint that fans interact with, you start building a fingerprint, an identity. Who knows if it'll work, but it makes it far more enjoyable than it might've been otherwise."

That high-reaching aspiration will never truly be complete, but it will continue to unfold with each show, each release, and each new fan – there is undoubtedly much more yet to come. "The striving never stops; it accentuates every year. Every time we do something, our ambitions level up, and we get that drive to do something even bigger. Having finally done this album, which we waited for our whole career, we're ready to go right onto the next one."