Alex and Us
Alex and Us are a Portuguese band created by Bruna Oliveira, Luis Afonso and Vasco Nunes. The band just released their first few singles, delivering alternative sonorities fused with rock and poppy vibes. I got a chance to ask Alex and Us a few questions and they kindly answered, giving us a broad perspective on how their project came together.
When was your first contact with music? When did you meet and create “Alex and Us”? Vasco: Luís and I did other musical projects in the past. For Bruna, this is her first experience in a band. She had only played in her room but recorded some YouYube videos, mostly originals. At some point, during COVID lockdowns, I reached out to Luís to start creating music together remotely. We set up a system where we each shared changes we’d added to the song, and we started to have fun with it. Then, Luís' wife suggested a cousin of a colleague sing. She sent us her YouTube channel (Alex_I_think), and we immediately fell in love with Bruna's voice. We wrote her an email and to our surprise, she accepted the challenge of joining us in making music. This happened while still going through the multiple lockdowns, so we kept working on the project remotely. We even managed to rehearse remotely using Jamkazam, though not without lots of technical hurdles. Only after several months of progressing like this, did Luís and I meet with Bruna in person and start working physically together.
Who are your main influences? Luís: I feel I'm deeply influenced by the '70s and '90s with names like Bob Marley and Jeff Buckley. Vasco is also influenced by the ‘90s alternative scene. He's a major fan of the Pixies, the Beatles, and Portuguese bands like Diabo na Cruz. Bruna has been influenced by indie music like Cage the Elephant and Arctic Monkeys and more recently by Aurora and Sleeping at Last, but she's also greatly inspired by poet and novelist Benjamin Alire Sáenz, among other writers. We're very open to any new influence—the more diverse, the better. For example, we love how Phoebe Bridgers is trying "to make you cry" and how Elon Musk is trying to "make life multiplanetary".
Why are your songs in English? Do you find it easier to express yourselves or is it a way to start an international career? Bruna: Mostly, writing the lyrics has been one of my roles, and I've always found it easier to express emotions in English. It's probably a force of habit at this point, but the lyrics always come more naturally in English. Of course, this may (or may not...) make it easier to reach wider international audiences, but we believe in the cliché that the music is the language. Also, we love so many songs sung in Portuguese. So (having lyrics in English) is not at all a rule for us; in fact, we are not fans of rules in music and the arts. In the past, we had a Portuguese song in the making, and although it's on stand-by for now, we might come back to it. Eventually, we'll end up writing more songs in Portuguese.
Of this first set of songs you have released, which one is your personal favorite and why? Bruna: Our answers might vary, but I'd say we all have a special spot for "Lonely for a while", mostly because it was the song that made everything possible. This song was first created and uploaded to my YouTube channel, and that's where Vasco and Luís heard me for the first time and reached out. It was always in our plans to release this song as a band, with a slightly different touch to it. Apart from that, “Leads me nowhere” also seems to be one of our favorites. It's probably the simplest song we created, very unedited, very spontaneous. And the result was, in our opinion, very special and original.
Could you describe your creative process as a group? Bruna: Our current creative process is very different from when the band first started. During the lockdown, we started creating songs in the only way we could. Mostly, we'd share with each other the instrumental pieces we were working on, and after the instrumentals were mostly finished, I would listen to them until the right words appeared. Now, in our rehearsals, we do something similar, but more "on-the-spot". Whenever one of us has something new they've been working on, we share it in person and the others try to incorporate something new right then and there. This leads to a very nice trial and error method, which is fun.
As an independent band, what are the difficulties you find by managing your own career? Vasco: We still need to try and reach a lot of people that we think would enjoy our songs. Despite being so easy to be heard anywhere on the planet, it is super hard to reach people because there is just so much new music coming up each day and on so many different platforms. Also, from the beginning, it hasn’t been clear what the best approach for releasing new music is. Should we prepare an album and then release, or should we periodically release singles and then pack them in an album? Does it still make sense to release physical copies? We ended up going for the singles approach and plan to release an album soon with a physical edition. For now, this seems to fit our purposes, but we also think streaming services should be more balanced. Right now, it seems like there is a "rich-gets-richer/poor-gets-poorer" model, which could be easily fixed and made more just. This would enable more underground bands to survive which would benefit the whole industry both artistically and economically.
Do you think it is harder to “make it”, as upcoming artists, in the Portuguese music industry? Luís: We don't really have a comparison. We do have the opinion that the Portuguese music scene has been getting so much better in the last decade or so. The quality bar is really high and that makes things more challenging, which is ultimately a good thing. However, the chances of Portuguese musicians living off their craft are still very very thin. Culture and arts, in general, have a very low public budget in Portugal, which we don't think is very fruitful.
Upon discovering a new world, what is next for Alex and Us? Vasco: There are always lots of worlds to discover. :) As we reach the goal of producing our first album, we'll prepare for discovering the world of playing our songs live. We'll be promoting the album to try and reach new listeners, and we'll be always creating new music, which is what we like to do the most.