Interview with Joyer

October 22, 2025

On October 8, we had the chance to chat with Nick and Shane Sullivan, the main brains behind the indie rock group Joyer. With their new album due in a few days, the brothers told Atticus about their experiences recording in Chicago, the inspirations behind their slight sonic shift, and their time living in various cities.

On the Other End of the Line... is out this Friday, October 24, via Julia’s War Records. Watch the full interview with Joyer below! 

Atticus: October 24th is the release of the album, On the Other End of the Line. I’ve been listening a bit… I think my favs are “I Know Your Secret,” “Spell,” and “Test,” even though I’ve enjoyed the whole thing. It’s a solid listen from front to back.

Nick: Thanks! We tried to save a couple of ones that we really liked as non-singles, and you picked two of those out, so I feel like we picked right then.

Atticus: Yeah, I think y’all did good picking the singles too. “Glare of the Beer Can,” that’s a catchy one. And the one that dropped today with the music video, “At The Movies.” Quick question about the album cover and that video in general; what is the importance or meaning of the glowing animal? It looks like a cow or an ox or something.

Nick: When we got the album cover made—our friend Jack Tobias made it—we didn’t really tell him what we wanted or anything… We kinda just gave him a couple ideas of album covers that we like, and he just came up with it. We both love animals… I have a cow tattoo. Sabrina Nichols, who made the music video and also sings all over the album, is a huge animal person too. It was kinda the same thing with the music video, like “we like your work, just do whatever you feel like doing.”

Shane: It’s kinda become an unintentional theme… whenever we commission work from people. On our last record’s [Night Songs] album cover, there’s also a bull… I wish we had a more meaningful answer, but, we just like the imagery and the people that we collaborate with just get it from somewhere I guess.

Atticus: You two live separately, but I see you’re together now for a rehearsal. Run me through the separated songwriting process.

Nick: Since we’re brothers, we see each other often enough. A lot of it is coming up with ideas separately and then, when we're together, working them out and collaborating at that point. There’s a lot of voice memos sending back and forth… I feel like a lot of people think it's really rough because I live in Philly, and Shane lives in New York. But it used to be so much worse for us when I used to live in New York and Shane lived in Boston. To us, this is so much easier.

Shane: We always find time to meet up to work on music. Since we’ve moved to different places, we’ve had to actually make time for it. Before, we used to live in the same house and we’d be able to work on music all the time, but we’ve really made it work just carving out good chunks of time to go hard on it… we can isolate ourselves and just work on ideas.

Atticus: When you’re mid-album process, like how many times a month are you going to meet up?

Nick: This last album was kinda different for us because we had booked studio time before we got that into writing. It was less like a regular thing… Shane was still in Boston for a little bit of it, and I remember I drove up and booked a practice space for like two days to jam out some songs and stuff. It wasn’t as regular as it is now; now we meet up at least once a week.

Atticus: New York to Boston is pretty long, like five or six hours or something?

Shane: It’s like four or five hours usually. It wasn’t ideal, but we made it work, it’s definitely worth traveling to do this stuff, and it’s become a lot easier now which has been good.

Atticus: I’ve read this in some of the blurbs about your past couple albums, but you’re kinda moving away from the slowcore, kinda hushed bedroom-y sound. It still kinda comes through in a few of the tracks on the album… I thought “Creases” and “Tell Me” both had either slower tempo or just kind of that hushed sound. What inspired this change you think?

Nick: There’s multiple things, one is just as simple as like, our tastes in music have changed. We still like all that slowcore stuff, but I feel like we find ourselves listening to things that have more catchiness and hooks to them, on top of the fact that we started playing way more and like, the songs that are less slow are more enjoyable to us to play. I don't think we expected this album to be as removed from slowcore stuff as it is, but it kinda just happened that way. I’m glad to hear that there's still some hints of it here and there.

Atticus: Yeah, there were a couple tracks where the vocals were pretty low (in the mix) and they kinda had that drawn-out singing style that goes with the slowcore genre. The production overall seemed more fun to play… and I assume the more slowcore stuff is not as live, like you’re not recording the whole song in one take.

Nick: I guess at first we would track it take-by-take, but later on, since we started going into the studio more, we do like everything live. It’s definitely fun to write that slowcore stuff, I don't wanna say it’s boring. But especially since we have live [band] members, sometimes I’d be like “can you just play like the most basic drum beat you can?” It’s cool to get them more involved and be more like a band instead of a singular, two-of-us, driven act.

Atticus: How did y’all connect with Henry Stoehr from Slow Pulp?

Nick: It was a mutual friend of ours… we were talking about how we wanted to try something new with our next record in terms of who recorded it. Our friend Kelly thought that we’d be a good fit, and it was amazing working with him. Not only did he get what we were going for, but I feel like we were really compatible personality-wise, which was cool because we were there for like eight days and had a lot of long hours.

Atticus: Maybe it’s just because you live separately, but for the past few albums you traveled a decent bit to record—the last album was in Asheville, right?

Nick: It was mixed in Asheville… every studio album up until now we recorded in Rhode Island [at Big Nice Studio], which is a sick spot, I feel like every Boston band records there. This one we went to Chicago for, so it was definitely a way bigger trek than usual.

Shane: I like to travel for the recording of the album, I feel like it’s really fun to fully immerse ourselves in the process of making it. Back when we would record at Big Nice Studio, there were times when we would like, sleep there and be in the studio the whole time… It makes it easy to concentrate and think hard about the music. It’s always something that I look forward to.

Atticus: That does sound like it would be a great time… making it like a working vacation with the sole purpose of focusing on the music.

Shane: Yeah, it's really exciting and fun. This time in Chicago, we hadn’t spent much time there before, aside from touring. We would track all day, and walk around the city at night and explore.

Atticus: Speaking of touring, I know you as a band have toured with Horse Jumper of Love before, but Shane you played bass for them on their tour this year, right?

Shane: Yeah, I did! I filled in on their full U.S. tour, it was cool. It was a really fun experience for me because I haven’t ever played in any other bands aside from Joyer, so it was cool to experience being like a ‘hired gun,’ where like, I didn’t really have to worry about anything, I would just show up and play. I love those guys, so it was an honor to play with them.

Atticus: Are y’all fans of Turnover as well?

Shane: I hadn’t ever actually listened to them before that tour, but it was really cool… People really like them.

Atticus: I know a few people who think that the Peripheral Vision album is a monumental album for like, atmospheric indie rock.

Shane: Yeah, the crowd was like my favorite part; people were really moved by it. It was cool to see.

Nick: We came up listening to a lot of those Run For Cover bands. I think our music taste had changed right before that Turnover album came out. But we were super aware of all these bands, so it was a cool full circle moment to see, because you [Shane] played with Balance and Composure also (on that tour).

Atticus: Who were some monumental artists for you two when you were growing up together, that inspired you to start making music?

Nick: I think going back to the Run For Cover bands… we started this because we were so obsessed with Title Fight. Then we found Duster eventually, that was a big one for us. I feel like The Beatles since birth, like, we’ve been obsessed with.

Shane: I feel like they were the ones who got us really obsessed with music… it took us beyond just a casual music listener to like a nerd in that way.

Atticus: Yeah, and probably thinking about “how are they making these sounds?” One of the first CDs my parents got for us to listen to in the car was the 1 Beatles album.

Nick: Our bass player, Jake Miller, he grew up with that one too, and he knows the tracklisting and stuff. Our parents were more traditional, like, “you gotta listen to the albums all the way through, the way they are.” Yeah, that 1 album changed a lot of people’s lives.

Atticus: Shoutout to your parents for that, there’s definitely something to be said for hearing the full albums. I’m a big CD collector and I don’t really like to get the greatest hits as much as the albums as they came out. If I'm buying something in that form, I’d rather have it in less of a playlist form and more like the traditional way the album is… Are there any notable moments you had sequencing the new album?

Nick: This one was so weird… it just fell together perfectly. We found the first song, which was “I Know Your Secret,” and then just agreed across the line.

Shane: Even when we were tracking, we were like “Oh, this one sounds like the second song” or “this one feels like the last one." Usually there’s more discussion, but it just felt right.

Nick: And sometimes we’ll be like “We need a good album opener” and write towards that, but that didn’t happen on this one. It was just like, “these are our songs” and they just fell into the order that they are.

Atticus: I have a question for each of you specifically regarding your recent moving: Nick, I feel like a lot of people that I’ve met in Philadelphia have kinda done the opposite move of you — start in Philly, move to Brooklyn — so I’m curious what Brooklyn didn’t have that you saw in Philly?

Nick: The Julia’s War connection… I think a lot of contemporary bands that we’re compared to, and the ones that really inspire me are in Philly. There’s a lot of great bands in Brooklyn, but for some reason, I always gravitated towards those Philly bands. I loved living in New York, but it just got too expensive, which was kinda the main reason. My girlfriend who I was living with got a job in Philly too… I’m loving Philly, I'm starting my second year here. There were a lot of things that just made sense, and that’s what made me do it.

Atticus: I came (to Philly) for college in 2019, and I’ve been living here since 2021. I think it's an awesome city… a lot of crazy bands right now. But I grew up in Maine, so I ended up going to Boston a lot for concerts and stuff… It was like the nearest big city. Shane, as a young adult, what was Boston like, and how much did you interact with the music scene there?

Shane: It was cool. I went there for school initially, but quickly wanted to figure out what was happening with the music scene. I enjoyed it a lot more once I moved to Allston, which I feel like is the classic spot for house shows and the music scene. Once I moved into an apartment there,  my roommates and I had a basement that was part of a shared, three-unit building… The other apartments were like frat bros, so we thought “no one’s gonna mind if we throw shows.” Something I don’t experience here in New York is that people would get really excited for a DIY show [in Boston]. We would host our friend’s bands and it would be so packed… It was really fun, but really stressful hosting shows… I think we only did like three or four, but it felt like we did a bunch. I feel like the music scene there has changed a lot, especially right as I was leaving. People come and go from that city a lot… I guess a lot of kids probably go to school there and then move.

Atticus: Interesting, I don't know that many bands out of Boston… and that might be like what you said, people come and go.

Shane: A lot of the bands that I was stoked on when I first moved there… I don't think any of them really still live there. I think they’ve gone to New York or Philly.

Atticus: Do you have anything else you wanna add about the album? Any cool little facts or stories?

Nick: Jake—who plays bass for us live—the plan was originally not to have him on the recordings since we usually do everything ourselves. If we ended up needing to record more stuff, it would've been really hard to fly back out there, so last minute we called up Jake to see if he wanted to fly out with us, and he was down. It feels like a very community-based album in a way because he was with us the whole time in Chicago, we befriended the artist Morgan Powers while we were recording there… We went bowling one night, and then we hung out like every day after that. She’s on the album too… a lot of unexpected things happened to make this album, which I really appreciate.