Pearl & The Oysters announce new album and share video for ‘Big Time’

Pair have broken their ‘no love songs’ rule

Pearl & The Oysters have announced they’ll release a new album in September – and have shared the video for first single ‘Big Time’.

Pearl & the Oysters – Juliette Pearl Davis (Juju) and Joachim Polack (Jojo) – met on their first day of high school in Paris, and have been together ever since. Their creative and romantic partnership has held strong through college and jazz school, their musicology studies at the Sorbonne, and beyond as the band moved to America. Their new album Planet Pearl is the culmination of nearly two decades of connection and collaboration.

Over time, Juju and Jojo came up with an unspoken rule – no love songs. It held until early last year, just as their Stones Throw debut Coast 2 Coast made land. While Jojo was away on tour with Mild High Club, Juju had an intense anxiety attack and wrote “I Fell Into a Piano” as a way to feel closer to him. She says, “I pictured myself falling into a piano (him), cradled by his lush harmonies.” The song came together in less than an hour – “a rare and magical thing” – and when Joachim came back, he added violin parts.

This wasn’t the only change to Pearl & the Oysters’ approach. Earlier albums were rooted in a sense of place: Flowerland waded the swampy art-rock waters of Florida, and Coast 2 Coast documented L.A., with a breezy, AOR-inspired sound to match. But Planet Pearl is extra-terrestrial, written from the perspective of castaway space explorers marooned on Earth.

“An interesting thing about this song is that its puzzle-like lyrical structure actually mirrors the piecemeal process by which the track came together,” the duo told Juno Daily, “that is over the course of four several discreet studio moments that happened in this chronological order. The first was in LA in February 2022 at our friend Dent May’s recording studio Honeymoon Suite where we tracked the rhythm section for the intro and the verse with Teo Halm (a genius producer who also happens to be Joachim’s cousin) and Jules Crommelin (of Australian disco prodigies Parcels).

“The second was about a year later at Stones Throw Studios where we recorded the incredible percussionist Brijean Murphy, the third was in a Paris home studio last Spring where we put together the choruses and the bridge, and the last one was back in LA in December 2023 at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum where we used a number of painfully as-awesome-as-they-are-rare type machines in order to put the finishing touches on the arrangements/production.”

Pre-order your copy of Planet Pearl, due out on September 27, here