Georgie & Joe are a new duo from Hackney, East London. They write bold, maximalist pop songs that explore the desire to escape: to break free, to embrace something different, to feel something new.

Escapism is the reason the duo formed in the first place. Joe first met Georgie through a mutual friend when he was seeking a vocalist to join his previous band, and the two began meeting up to four times a week to rehearse and record. Yet before long, they were feeling suffocated by their surroundings, with their approach to songwriting, with the way they presented themselves so they decamped to Berlin and started writing from scratch. The result was a totally refreshed approach to making music, one which put fun, immediacy, and lyrical honesty at its heart.

Georgie & Joe are both multi-instrumentalists and producers, they both write, both produce, and they both sing across their songs. Georgie originally hails from Norwich, and grew up hearing melodic alternative rock bands like R.E.M. from her dad, but it’s the emotionally forthright songwriting that she discovered as she got older (Bright Eyes, Eels, and Elliott Smith) that most inform her lyrics today. She was eventually turned on to electronic production after hearing Grimes: “I saw a video of Grimes where she said, ‘This is the first synth I got.’ And I thought, that’s the first synth I’ll get,” Georgie says. Joe, on the other hand, was raised in Hackney. He had a classic pop upbringing of The Beatles and Stevie Wonder, and played disco and funk as a drummer, but a customary teenage infatuation with Radiohead and Kid A eventually led him to electronic music. 

Today, Georgie & Joe cite 1980s Japanese ambient artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura, Haruomi Hosono, and the wider Yellow Magic Orchestra extended universe as influential on their sound – particularly the way these artists used high-tech, digital synths in their work. Georgie & Joe use similarly synthetic sounds in their songs, having been drawn to the Yamaha DX7 (a synthesiser beloved by ’80s pop musicians for its glossy and artificial sound) when they started the project. “It felt new – like it didn’t have any kind of pre-existing meaning for what sort of song we should write,” says Georgie. Joe adds: “It creates sounds that are like shit versions of real instruments. There’s something really evocative about a sound that is slightly wrong.”