This Toronto-based electronic indie artist’s new singles channel longing and nostalgia ahead of his upcoming EP
By Tristan Grajales
At summer’s end, Jakob Boon came out swinging with his shoegaze-inspired single “K.O!!!.” The 23-year-old singer-songwriter and producer weaves his vocals through punchy drums and distorted guitars while questioning the pursuit of a pipe dream. “Why try when you just don’t bother? / Somebody’s always doing it better,” Boon confesses, reintroducing listeners to his ruminative sound, four years after his last official release, lightwaves.
On a hot October afternoon at Woodbine Beach, the sun blares over scattered footprints in the sand. From across a charred picnic table, wearing a Dsquared2 cowgirl hat and a Fender tee, Boon reflects on his upcoming EP, Scorpio. “It’s a very early 20s mindset,” he explains. “I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s basically all I’m asking on the project.”
Over a hazy soundscape drifting between ‘90s electronic and alt-rock influences, including The Smashing Pumpkins and my bloody valentine, Boon explores a through-line of longing. “I wrote it all about how I was feeling at the moment, but then I think at the end I realized — every single song, I’m wishing for something.”
“I’ve had a few [listeners] think it’s relationship-based,” Boon shares of the defeated “K.O!!!” “I didn’t even think about that.” With a dirty vocal that unfolds into a dizzying pre-chorus and draws on Julian Casablancas’ slack delivery, Scorpio’s lead single is a plea for creativity to strike. “I feel like the writing process and releasing [music] takes so much energy, but then promoting it — I have no energy to do that,” he admits. “And that’s like 80 per cent of it.”
Following the auteur spirit of Wong Kar Wai and Sofia Coppola, whose films inspired the melancholic world of Scorpio, Boon serves as the sole writer and producer of his discography. “I think at the start, it was more just out of necessity,” he recalls. “I didn’t have a big network of music people, especially living in the middle of nowhere.”
Boon grew up in a small town in rural Ontario, somewhere between the calm of Ottawa and the creative pulse of Montreal. The nearest store was an hour away — long drives were soundtracked by The Smiths, Björk, or Britney Spears deep cuts his dad burned onto CDs. “I only lived across a farm and a graveyard,” Boon notes, reflecting on his upbringing. “I had, like, three neighbors, but they were all a kilometer away.”
Even at his arts high school, like-minded collaborators were hard to find. While Boon gravitated toward Charli xcx’s forward-thinking Pop 2 and the GarageBand origins of Grimes’ Visions, his countryside peers were headed in another direction. “Everyone in my network was just making very chillwave, Mac DeMarco-type sounds, which I feel sometimes seeps into my music too,” he remarks. “But I think out of the sound that I wanted… I didn’t know anyone who was making it as well.”
After years of working solo on a four-track cassette recorder, Boon finally opened the door to collaboration. “I felt like I had spent so much time on [Scorpio] and invested all of my energy into it,” he says, which was when he brought on Toronto-based audio engineer Mingxuan Gao to mix and master the project. “I wanted to respect that and do it right.”
On his newest single “FinalFantasy,” named after the operatic Japanese video game, Boon crafts a gutting plea for connection. “When you close your eyes / Are you picturing me?” he wonders over a hypnotic dance track that flutters like a nervous heartbeat. “I did have three versions of it,” Boon reveals — a shoegaze interlude, the electronic fever dream it became and a short-lived marriage between the two. When it comes to decision-making, Boon turns to his friends and family for honest feedback. “It was always like, ‘Sounds great, but turn up your vocals,’” he laughs.
On “Hotel Notepad,” the forthcoming heart of the project, Boon searches for direction. “That one, I’m really nervous to release,” he confides. “But I really kind of forced myself to keep it in because it’s honest.” With an EP named after his own zodiac sign, Boon leans fully into self-examination. “I wanted to be more open to writing about my own experiences,” he explains. “I feel like a lot of times I would write imaginary experiences that didn’t really happen. But this one is more me.”
After recording his debut project, lightwaves, in the isolation of a COVID-induced quarantine, Boon needed a change of scenery. The freewritten verses of “Hotel Notepad” emerge from a spontaneous month-long escape to Tokyo last year. “I booked it randomly with one week’s notice,” he remembers. “It was to get away from my overthinking.” In the city’s dense crowds and dazzling lights, he found space to disappear from his own desires.
As a graduate of OCAD University, Boon’s visual sensibilities extend beyond the sights of Tokyo. The black-and-white references of Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence, the smoky boxing aesthetics behind “K.O!!!” and the campy, on-the-nose rock imagery from the Scorpio photoshoots by Gillian Stam all contribute to his world-building.
“The graphic designer in me is thinking how it would look before even writing,” he says. “Sometimes that comes in handy. Sometimes it limits me.” Without any melodies pinned down, Boon is already building tracklists to match the visuals in his head. He often imagines names for pop groups or conjures up album concepts that he believes should exist — whether he’s involved in them or not. “I think it stops me from just exploring and being carefree,” he explains. “I kind of lock myself in a box of, ‘It has to sound like this. It has to have this vibe.’ And sometimes it’s better not to.”
Stepping out of these constraints, Boon is turning his introspection outwards. “I really want to perform more and get more into the Toronto music scene,” he shares. “I feel like I have a habit [of being] very closed off, so I really want to be more supportive of others… I want to hype up other people.”
When the time comes to perform Scorpio, Boon envisions an intimate one-man show blending guitar, backtracks and camcorder projections. “Trying to explore those types of avenues, which I haven’t ever done… That’s what’s inspiring me right now.”
As the shrivelled leaves gather themselves around our picnic table, Boon reflects on how finishing Scorpio brought his uncertainty and longing into clearer focus. “I actually don’t care at all,” he declares, before catching himself. “Well, I still care — but it’s just kind of being like, ‘Fuck it. Whatever. I’m just gonna keep going.’” It’s less indifference than clarity and a reminder that for Boon, songwriting is a way of moving forward, even when the longing remains.
