Interview with The Boy

We met up with Merry, Josie, Aaron and James, the members of up-and-coming band “The Boy”. After discussing the upcoming collaboration between KERB Productions and the band, we wanted to dig a little deeper and get to know the band at its core. In this interview, The Boy reflect on wanting an organic growth for the band’s identity and sound, and establishing a unique musical presence. 

How long have you guys known each other?

Merry: “Well obviously, me and Josie are sisters”
Aaron: “Yeah and me and Josie met around 6/7 years ago. Way before COVID. We met through a mutual friend and we just kind of had a conversation about our music states. We realised quite quickly that we had the same tastes, Josie picked up the guitar and I got on the drums and that was that!”
Merry: “Me and Josie have been singing since we were kids. I was in school choirs and things like that…”
Interviewer: “But with you two being sisters, of course sisters don’t always get along. The jam sessions seem to have started with Josie and Aaron – when did you come into the mix?
Merry: I think we started to get along more when our parents split up. We were just sort of hanging together and realised “you’ve got to be on each other’s side, really! You always want to have someone in your corner. Then we realised that we’re actually really similar and ended up being really good friends. 

And where are you from?

We’re from Halkyn, a little village in North-East Wales.
Interviewer: There’s a fair few bands coming out of Wales at the moment!
Yeah, I think it’s quite nice, because we are a small-town band but with big ambition. A lot of bands come from big cities like London, New York or Paris, and are very multi-cultural places, and tend to have friends in high places. We’ve come from nothing and want to build from the ground up. 

Your band name is “The Boy” and I loved on your Instagram handle where it said “not to be confused with a boy-band”, so with that being said, is there an origin story to the band name?

Josie: It’s a funny story, because the origin is a little bit unknown. It was kind of a long-running joke between Merry and I. Whenever we’d tell a story about someone that we didn’t really know, we’d say “oh it’s the boy”. It’s so silly but The Boy became almost like a mythical ambiguous creature, and we just thought it’s something personal to us. So it was a funny story between us but also had that mysterious quality and we thought that would be the perfect band name. We’re a mystery from day one, and given that we’re not all boys, we love the irony of it as well. 

Was there a moment when you thought “this could be more than just jamming” and decided to apply yourselves to be a “proper” band? 

This is something we’ve been doing in our spare time and love it. We get together and practise in our rehearsal “shed” all the time – we’ve made it into our little spot. So being able to actually go out and perform in front of other people and see that their enjoying it as well is just amazing. We feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface, so really looking forward to continuing. We want to move forward and think bigger, play more gigs to bigger audiences, and through that, hopefully get more recognition. 

I’ve also noticed we have someone new with us today?

Merry: So this is James, and he’s my boyfriend, who also happens to play bass, and he’s the newest addition to The Boy. We’re really excited about the addition of James, we think it will really help polish our sound and make it sound a little thicker and really polish us as a band. We’re here to take this to the next level. 

For anyone who hasn’t heard your music before, how would you describe it to them? 

I would say we’ve actually tried to be not genre-coded. I would say we’re very eclectic and we don’t want to come across too manufactured. It’s a collaboration – we don’t want to conform to a genre, we want to create our own. 

What would you say your musical influences are, or the favourite type of music to listen to?

Josie: When it comes to music that I play, instrument wise I’ve done a bit of everything. Obviously, my main instrument is guitar, but when I was younger, I also played the harp and the flute, and a little bit of the piano, and I’d love to feature some of that in our future songs. But when it comes to music I listened to, I love Amy Winehouse, Gerry Cinnamon, Fleetwood Mac, Paolo Nutini and Led Zepplin.
Aaron: My favourite band would be Blink 182, a bit of a rogue one I love at the minute is Mr Traumatic.
Merry: Daft Punk are my favourite band of all time and I love lots of dance music but the I love the likes of Led Zeplin, Massive Attack and James is a massive Iggy Pop fan! 

What is your favourite cover song to perform?

We always try and do songs that people mightn’t necessarily hear from your usual cover band before, we don’t want to wash out an Oasis song just because that’s what everyone else is doing. We’ve tried to pick songs like Jungle – Tash Sultana, Watch Tower – Jimmy Hendrix but I would say that we’re focussing much more heavily on our originals at the moment. 

When it comes to your originals, who would you say takes the lead in the song writing process?

Merry: I would say it’s pretty collaborative. Josie and I will create most of the lyrics, but we always bring everything that we do to the table for any changes or tweaks.
Aaron: And then anything instrumental, that’s where I get most of my input.
Josie: We actually have some new songs that we haven’t performed live yet, that Merry and I have written individual songs ourselves, but even with those, nothing has been set in stone, we’ve brought them to the table because at the end of the day we’re a band, and want everyone to be happy with what we’re putting out there. 

Is there anything in particular that you pull from, subject wise, when writing your songs? 

Merry: For me, I’m so all or nothing when it comes to ideas. I can be creatively blocked for so long, and then it’ll come to me at the most in-opportune times and I’m like “fuck, I need to write this down!” “Something Changing” which was the first original song we performed live, Josie wrote the guitar piece and was just playing it over sand over and the words just came to me. Sometimes it can come from the most mundane things, like objects we see around – you can draw inspiration from anything! There’s a song I wrote recently about being left alone in a taxi – that didn’t even happen to me. People write songs about relationship problems all the time, and I think there’s a misconception that to be a good songwriter you haven’t to be a troubled, tortured soul. We’re living in pretty depressing times, I think we can all acknowledge that, and we don’t want to write solely about that. We want to be able to give people an element of escapism through our music. 

What is the favourite original song that you’ve written?

“Something Changing” is definitely up there, as it’s the song that really got us going as a band. However, kind of drawing on what we’ve just spoken about, our song “Stone in the Peach” is a perfect example of that. The stone in the peach represents the bad within the good. There can be so much going on in your life, but at the end of the day, you can sit down, take a moment, and sit on the beach and eat a peach, and everything doesn’t feel quite so heavy. 

What’s the weirdest or most unexpected compliment you’ve ever received about your music? 

Aaron: When we performed at Ellen’s Charity Evening, someone came up to us and said “It’s really good to hear some old style music” and we loved that. I also love that we’ve never had “oh my god you sound like so-and-so” because we really want to have our own identity as musicians. 

You’ve mentioned about the state of the world at the moment a couple of times, and how you’d like your music to be a form of escapism – can you elaborate on that a little bit for us?

I think it’s great to be a young person and be politically aware and conscious, but as an individual there’s not much we can do. Of course you can vote, educate yourself and be politically aware, but I feel like our listeners will be feeling the same – a bit helpless. I feel like writing through escapism is a political statement in itself. 

Interviewer: Yeah, because you wouldn’t be writing in escapism-form if you had nothing to escape from. 

Exactly. It’s a sense of freedom. As a band, we want to be doing what we want to be doing, if they like it then that’s great, but we’ll always stay true to ourselves. I feel we want to have that level of escapism without being or sounding mainstream. The music scene isn’t what it once was, and we want to be part of bringing that back. 

Aaron: We wouldn’t sacrifice our authenticity for anything. 

Here at KERB, we’re really looking forward to working with such an ambitious and creative group of young people, who’s values really align with what we’re looking to achieve with KERB Productions. The Boy will be performing at our artist showcase in February 2026 – keep an eye out for updates right here on the website, and of course by following our socials.