Since forming in New York City in 2012, Bob Moses have earned massive acclaim for their transcendent blend of house music and emotionally charged pop.
Made up of Vancouver-bred musicians/producers Tom Howie and Jimmy Vallance, the Los Angeles-based duo delivered their debut album Days Gone By in 2015 and immediately drew praise from tastemaking outlets like Mixmag (who stated that “[i]t’s hard to think of anyone who walks the line between electro-pop and deep dancefloor grooves quite as coolly as Tom Howie and Jimmy Vallance”)
In 2018, Bob Moses returned with Battle Lines, which featured the hit single “Back Down” and led to a performance on “Ellen.” Hailed by The Line of Best Fit as “versatile, dynamic party music, made by masters of their craft,” Battle Lines also landed on Billboard’s Best Electronic Albums of 2018 list.
The duo’s most recent triumphs include 2019’s Unplugged EP, Falling into Focus – Live 2020 (a concert film documenting an hour-long set performed at an abandoned radio tower in Topanga, California), and Desire (a JUNO Award-nominated 2020 project that PopMatters lauded as “exceptional, its classic trance rhythms crafted with a sense of multidimensionality”).
What makes this album special in your opinion?
This album is special because it’s the most personal and honest album we’ve ever made. It was written during the pandemic, when the world felt as though it was crashing down around us. There were protests in many major cities, the world as we knew it was shutting down, and we weren’t sure what the future held at all. Would we ever be able to tour again? How bad was this all going to be? Was our music career over? When our identity around being touring musicians fell away, we realized that music is our life raft. It’s the thing we turn to when the outside world is shut off and we’re left to ourselves. We realized that the only way to process and find our way through this period of psychic unrest was to dive deep into ourselves and write this music. So this album and these songs are a reflection of everything we were going through and processing during this time. Our hope, our fear, our longing for connection, our reflection on the past, our looking towards the future. We’re super proud of the result and we hope people can resonate with some of what we discovered in ourselves.
What are some of the core messages/themes?
The album is called The Silence In Between, which is a lyric taken from the song, ‘Believe’. That felt like a perfect title for the album because the themes discussed in the songs were born of the feeling of being caught in between two moments. Life as we knew it was put on hold, and while we knew that the place we were in wasn’t going to last forever, we didn’t know how long it would last and what the new normal we would remerge into would look like at all. So on this album we’re reconciling with our past to figure out how to move forward into the future. We deal with loss, uncertainty, identity, fear, nostalgia, hope. If you don’t face them, where do you go? Silence can be uncomfortable. For us, this is the silence in between our old life and whatever new one we were going to create for ourselves.
What inspired “Never Ending”?
Never ending was written about the feeling of wanting to stay in a moment forever. Of knowing that it has to end, as all moments do, but not wanting it to and being sad that it must.
What are some of your values as a band/as artists?
We try to always write from a place of total honesty and to always let the music lead us in all that we do. Music first, everything else second. We also want to be honest in everything else we do beyond writing music and do our best to only engage with other artists, events, brands etc. that we feel we can honestly stand beside and are fans of. And always to try as hard as we possibly can. Always try to do the best job possible, whether it be performing, writing in the studio, or whatever else.
What do you think is the most important/exciting aspect of your life right now?
We are most excited about getting back out into the world and releasing this new album and taking our new live show all over the world to connect with people through this music. It’s one of the greatest gifts of our lives that we are fortunate enough to be able to write music from our hearts, put it out, and go see the world. Although we may not get the chance to meet all our fans one on one, it is a special and beautiful thing to be able to connect with many more people that we otherwise would of by sharing an intimate part of ourselves and putting it out into the world through our music. So we are very excited to get out there and be able to do that again.
