“Jupiter 2 is the songwriting and recording collaboration of Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based multi-instrumentalists Nick Cirone and Ian Campbell. Together at Nick’s home studio, they construct hazy, starry-eyed, and hypnotic pop songs with vintage-toned vocal harmonies often set within textured layers of noise and field recordings. The duo self-released their new album “Cursory Glow” – their first project in three years – on August 4th, 2023. On the album, the two pair effervescent chillwave-inspired synth and drum machine work with washed-out shoegaze guitars, while still maintaining their inclination toward sweet, psychedelic pop melodies.“
I have discovered this band mainly thanks to our “monster” playlist we recently created called SP500 – INDIE MUSICIANS UNDER 500 MONTHY LISTENERS, which has over 200 musicians in it and more than 100 saves. You can still be part of it, just follow our post.
I am glad I could discover the bands and they wrote me about their recent album that was mastered by legend Max Gowan (highly recommended). The album is a really nice blend of psychedelic shoegaze chillwave dream bedroom pop. I am really enjoying the sound of the album and I wish it was pressed on cassettes because it is super cool. I have shared so many great albums in the past two months and there are more incoming. I am so so thankful to do this blog, to discover music and write about it. I hope you enjoyed my findings, sometimes it feels like shouting to the void: “Hey, this is great!”, but, to be honest, I have always done this blog just to share some love with bands and have an outlet where I store good music.
If you have not started listening to this album, go and hit that play button. Everyday is a good day to start a new track.
I talked to Nick and asked him our 3 questions:
What inspired you to start making music and what keeps you making music?
I feel like my bandmate Ian and I have always been very personally drawn to music – I remember being very emotionally affected by songs I would hear from a pretty young age. But I think for both of us we were inspired to write music when we became teenagers and were exposed to artists like Pavement and Mac Demarco – to me their music felt like something I could make at home with limited budget and equipment and their songs felt so genuine. We continue to make music because nothing really gets us more excited than music in general – hearing new songs, discussing favorites, trying to improve our writing and production, playing shows – loving music and being passionate about it feels very central to our identities and so writing and releasing music, and constantly trying to improve our craft feels very natural.
What was the most challenging thing in your music (artistic) path?
The most challenging aspect of making music for us is honestly promotion and trying to get our music out there for others to hear – we love making music but we both work full-time jobs and any time we spend on promotion or creating merch or content takes away from the time we could be spending practicing, writing or recording! We are not avid social media users either, which doesn’t help. It’s so impressive how many other musicians are able to handle entire careers alongside their musical projects, and do it gracefully! But more specifically about musical challenges I think we really try to push for big, blown-out sonic atmospheres while recording at a home studio, and it takes a lot to work past the limitations of recording in a non-professional space and producing/engineering everything ourselves. However, we feel like recording DIY allows us to work more creatively and create a more specific sound!
What would you dream to do if anything was possible?
Personally, my dream would be to put out music that affects others or inspires others in the same way that some of my favorite music has inspired me or affected me! Like I remember first hearing mbv’s Loveless for the first time when I was 15 or 16, riding in the car through the Appalachian Mountains – that record sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard and it completely changed my perspective on recorded music and the sort of freedom an artist has with sound. If we made music that had anywhere close to that sort of effect on somebody, or if it inspired others to create music I would feel very accomplished! We would also love to have the opportunity to play at a decent-sized festival at some point – even playing a tiny side stage in the middle of the day to like 60 people would give us a feeling of success in what we are doing!
Go and support the band on Spotify.