Bren Joy

Adam Alonzo

The music industry thrives on the exploitation of young artists who are eager to entertain. Young artists are burdened by industry demands, with debut albums expected to be nothing short of extraordinary—no flops, no misses, only hits. But how can they achieve this when they are often in their late teens or early twenties, lacking the real-life experience that provides the foundation for something truly exceptional? If they’re fortunate, their first album may be remarkable; if not, they might spend the rest of their careers trying to distance themselves from a debut that was riddled with excessive pressure.

For Bren Joy, his 2019 debut album Twenties, released through Warner Records when he was 22, was a solid effort that showcased his vocal talent and ability to blend genres.  Hailing from Nashville, he comes from a rich musical background—his grandfather was one of the city’s first Black record store owners. The eight tracks on Twenties were the first songs he ever wrote and recorded, created in a classmate’s apartment at Belmont University. He toured with Pink Sweat$ and Megan Thee Stallion, The album was followed by a deluxe edition in 2021, featuring collaborations with Pink Sweat$ and Mae Marner. Everything was on an upswing, but then there was silence; Bren Joy disappeared. Until now.

Spanning twelve tracks, Sunset Black brings listeners up to date with Bren Joy's experiences. Now 28 years old, the R&B album reflects on his three-year hiatus during which he moved from Nashville to Los Angeles. It delves into themes of growth, love, heartbreak, and toxicity—because who isn’t doing some toxic shit they shouldn’t be doing? Sunset Black solidifies Bren Joy’s ability to seamlessly draw from a range of genres—whether it’s folk, pop, or jazz—and blend them into his own distinct alt-R&B sound.

Just days before the release of Sunset Black, we sat down with Bren Joy to discuss his highly anticipated new album, his three-year hiatus, stepping into the role of CEO, and his relentless drive to have it all.

You realized after high school you could sing. You went to Belmont University. You were around a lot of music. Was your dream to get signed to a label, or was it simply to pursue music in any way possible?

The dream was to become a Musical Director and start to build these choirs, build these shows for people. None of this was supposed to work. I started as a point of me trying to heal and trying to get through some trauma. I noticed that people listen to me sing more than they listen to me talk or complain about the things that I was complaining about. I used this as a tool to say what I want to say and then all this amazing stuff came with it.

You get signed to Warner in 2020 and enter the major label system, which is the dream for most artists. However, this came with expectations. It was no longer about just making music; you need to be an artist who can do so many different things. What was that transition like? 

People forget that art takes time, right? The best of the best that we see now, even the Grammys just now, are a testament to how long it actually takes to reach the point where we compare ourselves to these greats. So, for me, being on a label with people who were also great—like Bruno, Dua Lipa, and Lizzo—was incredible. It felt a little like Fear Factor, you know? I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I was releasing music, the numbers were great, and people loved to hear me sing. That was the basis of what I thought I was doing; everything else felt like an additive.

The business is very dirty, and you can lose yourself very fast. So, I took a step back, which, in some aspects, may have hindered me or slowed things down more than they could have been. But I also think that, from a personal standpoint, there’s just a lot you need to learn on a label. It takes a very, very long time to excel and get to the point where you are benefiting the label as much as they are benefiting you.

Adam Alonzo

TikTok became big and nowadays: people don’t just want music; they want access to you. They want access to your trauma. So when you're in this label and things are happening, you also have a fan base that is growing. How did you reconcile that? You seem to be a private person, and you seem to keep your personal life to yourself and offer what you can in your music. But at the same time, there are expectations that, if you want to be big, you need to give us all your stuff.

I signed right before TikTok became a thing. It was definitely kind of a mind-fuck like “Whoa, I signed up to be an artist, not an influencer.”  And so, the thing about a label, which is their job, is to pivot, right? It's the music industry's job. When you see something working, you pivot. When everything in the entire industry pivots at once, you freak out as an artist, thinking, “Oh shit, we just got like 16 other jobs put onto us, and the world is ending.” I definitely had to learn a lot about how to navigate, and I do see the benefit of the mindset of most labels during that time and still now. I think there's a benefit to it all; just whatever path you take gives you a different outcome of the type of artist you want to be. If you want to be a superstar, you have to give up a little pie.

Are you independent now?

I am independent as of now, yes.

And are you enjoying that? 

I enjoy the challenge for sure. There is a beauty to owning your music, of course. It is the hardest thing I've ever done, being a CEO.  You have to hire out all these people. You hire out your managers, your team, your social media team, your PR, everything separately. There's something really rewarding about it.

In some of your early interviews, right around when you got signed, you talked about Tumblr R&B and looking at Frank Ocean as an inspiration. It's interesting because Def Jam had shelved him; they weren't putting out any of his stuff. Nostalgia, Ultra, he just dropped that himself on Tumblr. You have your own journey through the label system, you leave the label, and now you're independent making your best music ever. Was Frank Ocean a source of inspiration, obviously as another queer Black man, but also in terms of how he navigated the label system? 

Yes and no. It's not how he did it that inspires me; it's the fact that he did it that is inspiring. He molded his own career. That's the Frank Ocean business model. Looking at someone who was, at the time, one of the only queer Black men in the industry to really make a move like that and see it work—like, see it be successful—it's inspiring. I get the biggest hard-on for just a good big risk, big reward. I love when people swing. I love when people miss even more. That makes me so excited. When I look at a Cowboy Carter and I see someone just swing, I think that's why we do this. We're gunning for the best job in the world—one of the most sought-after jobs in the world and arguably one of the most rewarding. It's supposed to be like that. It's supposed to feel like you're risking it all.

Adam Alonzo

Sunset Black is a complete body of work. It would have been easy to drop singles here and there, opting for a TikTok-friendly approach instead of a traditional album release. You chose not to. Why?

I want people to be able to look back at my discography and know exactly where I was in life. It's a living diary. It’s how I was thinking, who I was dating, and how serious I was taking relationships. All of that can kind of be gleaned from this music. Sunset Black is minimalistically erotic. There are a lot of themes that I’m really playing with. “Wandering,” for example, is this love song romanticizing infidelity. It’s so interesting taking those themes and worlds and run with it. Being independent and being by myself, we're able to really dive into that because I also have the time to go through the experience.

“Wandering” has a jazzy feel to it. You’re writing, producing, and co-producing the entire project. Can you talk about that song and your process?

I'm a huge jazz head. I have a full Miles Davis tattoo. I grew up on instrumental jazz, right? So I grew up charting horns. When I got to college, I started charting horns and really focusing on jazz standards and stuff. I think there are certain artists that I really look up to. Solange and I also look back to early Stevie Wonder, where I love their business model and blueprint. Solange orchestrating an entire ballet is profound to me; it's prolific. I think the idea of doing something like that is so exciting. The first step to that was I wanted a jazz standard that was acceptable in college. So I sent it to my professors and asked if someone performed this, would it be acceptable? But I also wanted it to have a modern take from someone that is arguably toxic.

There’s a lot of excellent vocal production on this album. The background vocals sound like a choir and complement the main vocals. Can you talk about focusing on that and building a whole world around it?

Thank you so much. Every background vocal is me in this entire album. Everything right now is very kind of verbed out—so many songs, right? You have Mk.Gee, who's incredible; Dijon, you have Q, you have Choker, you have all these amazing artists. I wanted to go the antithesis. I wanted to have so much faith and confidence in my melodies, my rhythms, and my voice. A lot of the leads are here; they're so dry. We didn't really tune anything. Everything's dry; everything's right here is really raw. But surrounding that is everything else that is textured. Compared to my first project, this time we just took a bit more of a subtle approach, but even more ballsy, I think.

“BLOODONTHETIMBS” starts off with you singing, ‘I just might be your bitch tonight.’ When writing a song, you put everything on paper, but you can always go back and change it before putting it out—there’s always that option. You wrote it, recorded it, and put it out.

Wild. Diabolical. Manic. No, it’s definitely a lyric where, my parents heard it and they go, “I thought this song…” I think it's my way of giving people pieces of my personality. I’m the type of dude where if I see someone at a bar, I go up to them and I'm like, ‘Yo, you're stunning. What's up?’ And you're either going to say you're into it or not. Either way, I'm gonna have a good night. Meeting someone that has that same energy—that's what happened the night before that. I was just in a bar, and I never get tongue-tied. I went up to this person and I was like, “Yo, what's up? I think you're stunning.” And then they were just like, “Oh, yeah, prove it.” And I go, “What do you mean?” And they're just like, “I'm trying to make you a princess.” And I’m like, “You, no, no, no, no,” and I ran out the door. I was like, “I'm not having it.” There’s no need to edit stuff anymore. You know, like, we got Glorilla; we don't need edit anything anymore. We need to have fun, and that whole song is just pure fun. It's a pure ode to UK early boom bap. I'm a huge Little Simz fan; I'm a huge Skepta fan. It’s an ode to that world of music and I think it's a hot song.

You're very honest; you're not hiding behind metaphors. You're going there. Have you ever felt like you needed to edit? Like, “Okay, Mom is listening. I gotta tighten up.'

In the past yes. This is the first song, the first music where I'm using he/him pronouns for my partners and stuff. It's the first for a lot. The only thing I edited was music-wise or if we wanted a harder bar or something like that. It's so honest, and it's so raw. A lot of the songs, like “No Fear,” are the same demo. Many of these are demos; we didn't re-record anything. These are just my day-offs, us being drunk, and “Couture” was like that where we didn't recut anything. The songs show you what they want to be, just like in fashion—fabric moves how it's going to move, and you have to adjust yourself to that. The songs will show you what they want to be, and sometimes you find that overthinking can make it a worse song than it is. That's why 'Never Let You Go' is as good as it is because we grew it in 15 minutes, and it was just easy.

You’re hitting so many different genres throughout the album. Zigging when we think you’ll Zagg. Zagging when we think you’’ll zigg.  “Never Wanna Let You Go” sounds very much in the vein of “Ho Hey” by The Lumineers. When you wrote the lyrics, did you know that’s how you wanted it to sound? 

We wrote another song in that same session, and at the end of my sessions, I do this thing where I spend the last 15 minutes on a pivot. In every session, we have a pivot, and I'm like, 'Let's start a new session, a new project. Let's just make something for 15 minutes and see what happens.'

Why 15? Why not 20? 

20 is overthinking. If we get a good song, we're going to get it in 15 minutes. If not, we’re not going to get it.

When did you learn that?

About a year and a half ago, I started doing it regularly, and I think it paid off. “Horse'“was the first song that it worked with. We made “Horse,'“and that demo we got in 15 minutes is what you hear on the album. I was like, 'This is hot. This is so sexy. This is poetic. I love this.' So, we wrote this other song, and it was fine, but I was like, “Let’s just shift for 15 minutes.” It was just me writing with my friend Conrad on guitar, and I was like, “Let’s try to kind of explore this world of where I come from.” I’m from Nashville. I came up in basement shows, with asbestos on the walls, we came up with “Riptide.“ That was our world.  Regardless of my influences or me being Black or whatever, that’s just the world I came up in.  'Never Want to Let You Go' was the easiest song to write on the record. I penned it so fast. Me being inspired by Macy Gray and all these incredible folk artists but applying it from a modern perspective.

When does your tour start?

March 17th in San Francisco

As an independent artist, you gotta conserve your coins and figure out where to spend them. Touring is getting more expensive.  The alternative is to go to a soundstage, record a live concert, sell it back to your fans. They would buy it. You’re going out on the road.  It’s not dancing, doing tricks; it's just you and your voice.

It’s the thing that lasts. There are artists that I’m friends with that stream what, a million monthly listeners? But they will sell out two nights at the Hollywood Bowl like that, and you'll be like, ‘How are they...?’ Touring will never leave. I think it's important to present the music in the form that it was meant to be listened to. For me, I wrote these songs to tour. It's a very interesting thing, touring, too, because my kind of perception of songwriting completely changed when I started touring.

I toured in China this past summer, and we did a few new songs, and some that didn't make it on this album. I was just like, we got to pivot, y'all, because they just don't resonate live. This isn't what... I'm not writing stuff that I want to hear people singing back to me right now. That's an issue; that's a massive issue. It just changed how complex I made things. It also made me pull back on some spaces. It also made me love the power of a good hook, you know? These are really important things that you kind of have to learn, and you kind of have to mess up to learn those things for me.

It’s very rare now for artists to be like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift; tour, sell albums, and do well on radio.  Do you want to be the kind of artist who can do all three, or is your focus on being a massive touring artist? 

No, I want it all. You asked me two years ago and I would have said, “No, I just want to tour. I’m fine.”

Why different answers?

This is gonna sound so narcissistic, but  I want to see more people that I relate to doing it all. It's embedded in being black and being queer that you reach a ceiling and that there's no attic above it, it’s just brick. We need that representation. I don't know if that's me or if that's someone else, but I will die trying

Do you have anything that you want to say to anyone who's an aspiring artist who wants to be where you are in terms of not just success but also confidence in their art?

Two things I’ve learned. One, there is art out there that will inspire you, right? That will shake you. And I guarantee you, 99% of the time, it's not going to be the art that is put in front of your face. You have to find it. You have to find incredible art. That’s just the struggle of the generation we live in; it gets shelved, it gets hidden. But there are incredible books, incredible films, and incredible moments that exist that your favorites have found. You know, that’s why they’re your favorites: because they found those things, and you’ve got to put in the hours looking for amazing art.

I think also the best piece of advice I’ve ever received is “Done is better than perfect,' and that changed my life. Just being like, “Done is better than perfect.'“ If it's hot already, let's put it out. I think for a lot of this album, you will really hear that most of the stuff, like I said, is untuned, it's demos, it's rawness, it's unedited, and I think that's what makes it so authentic.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.