Boyscott is the project of Scott Hermo Jr., who grew up in Montclair, NJ (across the street from Pinegrove’s Evan Hall) and also lived in Nashville before settling in the band’s current home state of Connecticut. Scott released Boyscott’s first album, Goose Bumps, back in 2015 when he was living in Nashville, had the album re-released by Topshelf and Babe City Records in 2019, and now he’s finally released the long-awaited second Boyscott album, Spellbound, on Topshelf. The band’s lineup has shifted a bit as Scott moved around the country–“it just depends on who’s around,” he said–and the new album finds Boyscott cleaning up and smoothing out some of the edges compared to their more lo-fi debut. They’ve long cited bands like Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors as influences, and their breezy, rhythmic indie pop scratches a very similar itch. Give it a listen below.
For a deeper dive into the album, Scott has broken the whole thing down for us track-by-track. Read on for he had to say…
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TRACK-BY-TRACK BREAKDOWN OF BOYSCOTT’S SPELLBOUND
by Scott Hermo Jr.
“Rocky Road”
I started writing this song in 2016. I made a lot of changes in the arrangements — the outro is only a couple years old. It’s about the mental gymnastics of committing to doing music as a career — as well as the fear and excitement of our early tours. I mention our longtime bandmate Emma Willer’s old band Slumber’s song “Stay Hidden” in the first verse — we did our first real tour with them in 2016 (before Emma joined the band) and no tour has felt as fun and exciting as that one — even with the overall low attendance at the shows and barely any money made lol.
“Arthur Kill”
This was the hardest song to finish on the record. It wasn’t until 2023 that I ended up getting it closer to what I was hoping for. We had even mastered the record and I realized I needed to change the choruses slightly by adding another little guitar part over it. There’s a boat/ship graveyard near Staten Island/New Jersey in the Arthur Kill tidal strait. It’s eerie with rusty boats floating in this murky New Jersey/NYC water. You can see it from above on google maps actually. I went to it in high school and I always wanted to write it into a song. Overall this song is an ode to growing up in New Jersey and spending time with friends in any nature spots we could bike to, no matter how sketchy and then coming back to them years later, after exploring Vancouver island or San Diego coast or Colorado rivers, and realizing it’s also beautiful in its own weird, sad way.
“Cabin Fever”
This song was the first new idea I wrote after finishing our first album Goose Bumps back in 2015. We’ve probably played this one live the most out of any other new song yet. It’s come a long way and changed a whole lot. It’s so old, I don’t even know what to write about this one. It’s about making and growing out of friendships.
“Moose Head”
This is probably one of the most fun songs I’ve ever written — it’s also super old and has come a long way — it was very hard to finish. We almost didn’t record it, I was so frustrated with it. We ended up jamming on it with our producer/engineer Scoops Dardaris at the lake and he did this little walk up bass line on the verse and it was the missing puzzle piece that I was looking for. I was able to quickly rearrange the song to make it work and we tracked it. Our drummer Noah Dardaris brought so much energy to the song on the drums. I had written all the drum parts prior but his performance and little changes were exactly what was missing. I’m still not sure I made the best version of this song yet — hoping to do a stripped down version at a live session or something and really simplify it. In my head this song exists in the northeast on the coast — Maine, Mass, CT, NH, etc. I wanted to make a short film at one point about a vampire farmer trying to kill the kid who was dating his neice — and then I ended up using those ideas for this song lol.
“Lima”
I saw my high school biology teacher’s partner’s band Tiny Canoe perform “Lima” in 2011 in my high school cafeteria for a GSA benefit concert – I was obsessed afterwards. There was only a demo of the song on Myspace and then it disappeared. Then in the summer of 2022 (a month before meeting Scoops and deciding to retrack the record together in the fall) I made a little demo cover of “Lima” by memory for fun. I took a lot of creative liberties and ended up just making an entirely new song but with their original melody and their initial guitar riff. I even eventually used the chord progression from “Moose Head” in the outro & choruses. While retracking at the lake house, I thought maybe we could try the “Lima” demo. Then Noah came up with a drum rhythm inspired by a Ewe drum tradition from Ghana he learned in school. Our friend / former bandmate Conor Ryan did some pedal steel overdubs at my house, and we ended up only using these little swells he did in the outro. I was also lucky enough to reconnect with Daniel Sheehan of Tiny Canoe who was really supportive and cool with us releasing it.
“After Dark”
This song is about appreciating the people we choose to spend our precious downtime/free time with when we get off from work and responsibilities. I just realized how hard so many people work and then go out of their way to be there for others on their little amount of free time that they have. It takes place during golden hour and the moment the sunset finishes and it quickly gets dark, and how big of a switch it is, especially in wooded areas. Or even super late at night, not able to fall asleep.
“The Pond”
This song started solely with a keyboard/synth voice memo on my phone in 2016 — I always felt it was worth trying to rearrange it into a full band song. I really love the outro to this song. The song is generally about returning to a familiar place after a long time and noticing the many things that have changed and the things that stayed the same.
“Below The Ladle”
This song was initially a scrapped instrumental outro to Rocky Road — then on the last night of renting the theater in Memphis, I remembered that outro and wanted to track it with the nice guitar room sound I had gotten there — so I pulled an all-nighter and re-wrote / tracked all the guitars for that song very quickly on the stage. The song is inspired by the big dipper. I also wanted a song with only Emma’s voice on it. The lyrics aren’t specific and overall I like when people form their own meanings of our songs, because I rarely have lyric heavy songs — but to me, the song’s broadly, subtly about capitalism being bad and unnecessary and unnatural.
“Fell”
This is the oldest song on the record — I wrote the majority of the music and some of the lyrics the same week I wrote “Embarrassingly Enough” and “Sleepaway” from Goose Bumps back in 2014/2015. Whenever we play it live I say “This is our most metal song” lol because it can get heavy live. The meaning of this song seems to change for me, but it’s mostly about feeling very close to someone and fully in unison.
“Orca”
This little jam was always just a goofy outro to “Fell” — but we decided to separate it, fleshing out the album to 10 songs.
Boyscott — 2024 Tour Dates
October 23rd, 2024 – Toronto, ON @ Velvet Underground ^
October 24th, 2024 – Ferndale, MI @ Loving Touch ^
October 25th, 2024 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups ^
October 26th, 2024 – Chicago, IL @ Subterranean ^
October 27th, 2024 – Minneapolis, MN @ Amsterdam ^
October 29th, 2024 – Denver, CO @ HQ ^
October 31st, 2024 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court ^
November 3rd, 2024 – Portland, OR @ Mission Theater ^
November 4th, 2024 – Seattle, WA @ Madame Lou’s ^
November 6th, 2024 – San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop ^
November 8th, 2024 – Los Angeles, CA @ El Cid ^
November 9th, 2024 – San Diego, CA @ Voodoo Room ^
November 11th, 2024 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar ^
November 13th, 2024 – Austin, TX @ Empire Control Room ^
November 14th, 2024 – Denton, TX @ Andy’s Bar ^
November 16th, 2024 – Nashville, TN @ Blue Room ^
November 17th, 2024 – Atlanta, GA @ Purgatory ^
November 19th, 2024 – Columbia, SC @ New Brookland Tavern
November 21st, 2024 – Durham, NC @ Motorco Music Hall ^
November 22nd, 2024 – Washington, D.C. @ Union Stage ^
^ w/ Small Crush