Just in time to make it into your Super Cozy Fall Playlist, joan is set to release their newest album, this love won’t last forever. With multiple singles already available on streaming platforms and a release date of September 25, 2025, we at Music Scene Media had the pleasure of having a little chat with Alan Thomas and Steven Rutherford, the masterminds behind tracks like “love somebody like you” and “i loved you first.”
It’s great to get a chance to speak with you. You’ve been pretty busy on the go for quite a while! How has touring been for you this year? Do you each have your favorite aspects of being on the road? What are some things that make all those long hours of drive time worth it?
thanks for having us; it’s great to speak with you too! touring this year was amazing; we’ve had a really busy year with creating this album and playing a ton of shows. feels like we’ve been all over the place, both physically and mentally, haha. being on the road is cool and hard and amazing and brutal. it’s a lot of driving and bumps and laughs and highs, so yeah, we definitely have a few things we cling to. we both love trying to find the best coffee we can get as soon as we get into whatever city we’re in, and we usually try to find a thrift store or a vintage store nearby. other than that, we just try to keep grounded by working as much as possible; it’s what we love to do.
Can you tell us what it’s like to go from playing those smaller, more intimate shows closer to home versus majorly shifting gears and going all the way to Asia and even Australia?
the best way we can describe it is treating it like a comedian treats the clubs even when they’re doing big shows all over the world — there’s gotta be a place you can workshop ideas, try new things out, and have low-stress environments to test stuff. for these smaller shows, we wanted to create spaces where there wasn’t any production, no frills, just new music we were working on and human-to-human connection. they were absolutely incredible, and they make playing shows in places like Asia and Australia so much more fun for us, because we feel like we can connect with everyone so much easier. we’re all just people that love music :)
After seeing so much of the world, do you think you could pinpoint what has been your favorite place along the way?
oh that’s impossible i think, but the one that comes to mind first is Japan. every time we’ve been in Japan, it’s only been for a day or two at a time, and it’s definitely somewhere we would love to spend a few weeks to a month. it’s absolutely amazing there, like a fantasy.
We’ve seen you work with a number of other artists on collaborations. What has that been like? How does that process differ from your typical process of writing for joan?
it has been so great, honestly. it has been a dream of ours since the start of joan, but we’ve always wanted to focus on building our own tower of songs before helping others build theirs. last year, we renovated a house and converted it into a studio, and since then, we’ve finally felt like it’s time for us to be able to produce and write for other people. we’ve worked with around 30 artists just this year, and it has been absolutely amazing. can’t wait to do more.
“alibi” feels like a big moment. Can you walk us through the story or emotion behind the track? How does “alibi” represent the sound or themes of the full record?
it does feel like a big moment; it’s funny what songs do that. it’s always the ones you don’t really plan on being a big one. actually love that about music. anyway, we wrote this song about a past relationship, and while we were talking about it, we just kept saying, “it’s crazy; it feels almost criminal to put someone through that” — and the concept of alibi came out of that. we were also on a co-write with someone, and their basement studio literally looked like an interrogation room, so it just felt like we had to dig in a little bit. sometimes the universe just tells you what to write about that day, and everything clicks. the album feels different than "alibi" but also very much in the same world. the album is darker than usual for us, it feels like something is in the distance coming for us; it feels eerily hopeful. it’s really specific to this timeframe in our lives; it almost feels like a polaroid to us.
How did the visual direction for the “alibi” music video come together? What were you hoping to express through it?
we wanted to put in physical form the environment we wrote it in. we created an ambiguous sort of faux interrogation room set (in a storage unit) and hired two amazing friends to act in the video. we wanted it to feel like watching someone unravel without them really knowing that we were watching, like an interrogation room. things start out sweet but eerie, and we watch everything unfold and get chaotic and messy. so proud of how that one came out.
To wrap things up, I would love to know: out of the tracks on your newest record, do you have any particular favorites?
“this won’t last forever” is a really special song that is so specific to this album. it was a completely different song for such a long time that we just couldn’t crack the code on, and then one day we said “what if we rewrote this to fit the album title”, and then it all clicked together in like an hour. we had a gap in the album where that information was needed to set the tone of the whole album, and when this song showed itself in that way, it became such a powerful song for us. it’s just crazy how you can feel like you’re hitting your head against a wall to make a song work for so long, and then all of a sudden the right decisions just fall in your lap in an hour. the whole record is really great, and we are so proud of it, but “this won’t last forever” and “space” are really special to us. they’re the bookends, too, which is kind of cool :)
