Duo Discuss Their New Album ‘Blink’

Bob Moses are searching for something few get to achieve: a lifelong career in music.

That might not have seemed obvious when the Vancouver-born electronic duo of Jimmy Vallance and Tom Howie were igniting dance floors at Brooklyn raves in the early 2010s. Now, they’re thinking a lot about what it means to be an adult.

“We started as kids, and now we both have new kids, so that gives us an interesting snapshot on the passing of time. There’s lots to look back on,” says Howie before the intimate Billboard Canada LIVE Q&A and performance at the W Toronto at the end of September. “We’ve had these highs that we used to dream about, but there’s still this element of feeling the same as we did when we were 16 in our bedrooms first wanting to make music.”

The pair’s debut album, 2015’s Days Gone By and 2018 followup Battle Lines were both chart successes on Billboard’s Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart, while “Love Brand New” spent 12 weeks on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs. They’ve received Grammy and Juno nominations and played dream shows at Red Rocks in Colorado and festivals around the world.

Bob Moses’ new album Blink is out Friday (Oct. 17) on AWAL, and singles including “Time of Your Life” are already hits on the Billboard Canada Airplay charts.

But there’s still something they’re trying to grasp: the elusive nostalgic high you get as a young artist starting out, when the world is still wide open.

“There’s an interesting headspace that comes from the feeling that you have all these highs and lows in life, but you don’t really feel like you can hang on to them in any real way or like they’re necessarily yours. You kind of just blink and they’re gone,” Howie says. “That’s the idea that we wrestled with a lot on this album, approaching that idea of the ephemeral nature of life. You have to just be present for the journey and maybe that’s the best we can do.”

Collaborating is a deliberate act for both of them. They live on opposite sides of the country, Vallance in New York and Howie in Los Angeles. They recorded Blink in Toronto and Vancouver, often writing pieces of music solo and then leaving it for the other to flesh out. But being together in Vancouver helped them remember their early days.

Howie and Vallance first met as teenagers in art class in the city. They weren’t friends right away — Howie was a year older, and they had different friend groups. They both started in punk and rock bands, but they had different interests when it came to music.

“I had gone singer-songwriter and Jimmy was in full trance mode,” Howie says. “We were kind of on opposite ends of the energetic spectrum.”

But they recognized something in each other: a desire to take music seriously, not just as a hobby, but as everything.

When they met back up years later in New York, that spirit drew them back together to start collaborating. Something clicked in them, and their mix of electronic and rock influences blended into what we now know as Bob Moses’ signature sound.

Though their music is often filed under the electronic/dance genre, they’ve seen recent success on the Modern Rock Airplay chart. Considering their upbringing, it’s actually a good fit.

“When we met back up in New York, the common ground we had was actually Canadian alternative rock radio,” says Vallance. “Growing up in Vancouver listening to 99.3 The Fox, that really impacted us. You’ve got everything from Tool to Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine — all that stuff that was big in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. And so to have some success at Canadian Alternative radio over the last couple of records, it’s very full circle for us.”

Onstage at Billboard Canada LIVE, they elaborated that it was also something specifically Canadian. Canada embraced British bands like Kasabian and Oasis, and produced its own canon of bands from Billy Talent to The Tragically Hip and Matthew Good Band. It all led to a unique musical perspective that is distinctly Canadian.

“We realize how Canadian we are when we’re outside of Canada,” Vallance jokes.

Vallance was raised directly on Canadian music. His mother, Rachel Paiement, was in the popular French-Canadian band Cano and his father, Jim Vallance, is the songwriting partner of Canadian icon Bryan Adams (as well as bands from Aerosmith to Heart).

Less than a specific sound, Vallance says his upbringing gave him an important perspective that he’s coming to terms with now.

“I think a lot of kids that have hockey players as parents, they try to follow that path because they know that the dream is attainable,” he explains. “It’s the same for me — knowing that the dream is attainable and that you could have a life where you could raise a family, be cool people and listen to rock music. I just loved it. And I loved it because they loved it.”

For Bob Moses, being a rock star isn’t a wild fantasy — it’s a realistic goal, and one that can become a long-term sustainable path. But it’s one they’re not taking for granted.

“Every time you do a tour and every time people buy tickets or records get on the radio, none of that is a guarantee,” says Vallance. “So we’re extremely grateful for all the opportunities that we’ve had and continue to have. We hope we have a long career and we’re just going to keep going for it.”

“I mean, look at Iggy Pop,” he continues. “I want to be that dude. He’s been up there doing it for decades. Tom and I have been doing this professionally for 12 or 13 years, and now we want to do it for another 12, 13, 20. I mean, if we still feel the way we do now in 20 years, like, why the hell wouldn’t we keep doing this?”

This article was originally published by Billboard Canada.