Vivacious musical polyglots b0ka serve pop-coated sounds with an irresistibly enigmatic air. Friends since kindergarten, the talented quintet blend polychromatic musical influences that are at once stubbornly hard to define and impossibly seductive.
The b0ka project burst into life in the mid-2010s, with their striking sonics quickly finding a home on some of meta-disco’s most revered imprints. EPs and singles arrived via Eskimo, Paper Recordings, Diamond Club – as well as on their own b0ka Recordings – winning countless admirers and generating invites to play at some of Norway’s most prestigious festivals.
In 2016, the band pushed pause to focus on a range of equally acclaimed projects, including Lakeshouse (Paper Recordings), OJKOS, Bjørnar Sira and Den Kosmiske Overorden. The onset of the pandemic allowed the childhood friends an opportunity to resume their b0ka adventuring, revisiting long-lost hard discs and re-imagining the choice morsels into the Sagrada Jukebox mixtape in the Spring of 2022. During this period, the band set to recording their dazzling and soon-to-arrive debut long-player ‘Forever, My Friend’ – an exquisitely complete collection of songs that are sure to satisfy the collective hunger of eagerly waiting fans.
For the uninitiated, the b0ka sound signature is deliciously challenging to describe. Drawing on the cut & paste dynamism of The Avalanches, the pristine pop swagger of the late, great Prince, and the tongue-in-cheek charm of Alex Cameron, b0ka present pop-ready songs with roots extending deep into the fertile soil of house, disco, R&B and electronica.
Nice to meet you! How are things going?
We’re good, thanks! Currently rehearsing our new b0ka live-set and writing songs for our other project, Lakeshouse.
Can you tell us a bit more about the band?
b0ka is an amalgamation of our friendship and influences. It’s funny, it’s serious, it’s eclectic, and it’s catchy. We’re known for making asses shake live.
As you have known each other a long time and grew up together, can you explain how the band formed?
From a young age we’ve played around in various DAWs like Fruity Loops and Reason, and had a bunch of short-lived bands including a black metal band, a DFA-inspired dance-punk band, a prog-rock orchestra, and a whole lot more. Once we moved from the country to the city in our early 20s we decided it was time to create something long-term, something that was more our own, more us. That band was b0ka.
How has your creative process changed since the early days of the band?
In the beginning we were experimenting like crazy. There’s nothing wrong with writing a country ballad one day and a techno-banger the next, but it does prove challenging both for your workflow and for the audience. Although we clearly had an idiosyncratic and recognizable sound early on, it has evolved a lot over the years. We slowly simplified and matured. Some might find us eclectic still, but compared to before we’re a lot more streamlined.
The new album ‘Forever, My Friend’ is due for release later. Could you go into more detail about the upcoming release?
This is truly a celebration of our friendship. A tale of growing up and looking back at our lives through the eyes of a grownup. Some songs were written from scratch. Some were written over ten years ago, and then re-written and sculpted into new versions. Others were kept pretty much as they were. Songs like ‘Stone Cold Girl pt 1’ and ‘When U Touch Me’ are youthful and posturing. Other songs, like the title-track, ‘Oh Baby’ or ‘Hear Me Out’ are more romantic and introspective. On the surface the album is really goofy and humorous, but there’s a lot of serious and dark aspects to it too. We love contrasts.
What kind of inspirations have you drawn upon when making the album?
When we originally started b0ka we were highly inspired by second-hand disco records you’d find all over shops in Bergen in the 2010s. People like Peter Brown, Roy Ayers, Luther Davis Group, Universal Togetherness Band, Rod Temperton etc. We’re also massive fans of The Avalanches and tried to incorporate their…je ne sais quoi-romanticism into our music. When we rediscovered our old demos and decided to make the album, we picked inspiration freely from both old favorites like Air and Daft Punk, and contemporary artists like Mr Twin Sister and Kero Kero Bonito. We also drew inspiration from our high school scrapbooks full of drawings, lyrics and inside-jokes, and all sorts of mementos from our lives together. You end up with a lot of shared memories after 30 years of friendship.
You have already released singles ‘Want Me To’ and ‘Let Go’ which will be featured on the upcoming album ‘Forever, My Friend’. How do these songs fit into the theme of the whole album?
As most people we’ve been through relationships, heartbreak and romantic tribulations. And as friends we’ve been there for each other through it all. And those two songs are honestly the most pop-tastic and single-friendly of the bunch. We really are a pop-band, after all.
What do you hope your listeners take away from the album?
b0ka really is about having fun, and this album surely reflects that. But at the same time, we want our audience to feel real connection, and to come away appreciating the strange concept of human friendships. Friends are the family you get to choose, as the cliché goes. That’s pretty wild. It’s such a beautiful thing, but relationships can also be really painful. We should appreciate the people in our lives, as without them it would all be pointless. Right?
Do you have a favourite track off of the album? Why is that?
We probably don’t have specific favorites (yet), but ‘Forever, My Friend’, the title-track, is in many ways the heart of the album. It strikes that magic balance of deeply emotional yet danceable disco, and it contains a sample from a song that’s very special to us by an old Norwegian composer named Hartvig Kiran. The lyrics are about a sailor longingly exclaiming that by dawn he’ll be far away, and that his ship will sail forever. It felt so fitting to the themes of the album. We’ve had this sample ready for over a decade, we just had to clear it! Luckily we got in touch with his daughter (the rights-holder), who’s probably around 80 years old by now. She said she didn’t think our song was her cup of tea, but she was happy to allow us to sample her father’s song. We’re really grateful for that and super happy we could sprinkle Hartvig’s magic dust over our album.
Great to chat with you today and wishing you all the best with the album release! To finish, is there anything else upcoming from yourself that you can let us in on?
Thanks so much for having us! There will be one more single before the album releases in May, and of course we’re working on our live-show. We’d recommend anyone waiting to hear the album to check out our previous release, ‘Sagrada Jukebox’. And there’s also our other project, Lakeshouse, which is us with our house-hats firmly on our heads. Shout out to Paper Recordings and Beatservice for all the support!
