Writing Pop Like a Bieber Record
The Bones of Love is the first record we've made that doesn't belong to a dance lineage. No four-to-the-floor. No house genealogy. No trance euphoria.
It's pop. Specifically — it's modern Bieber-era pop.
We want to be honest about that, because it's a deliberate choice and the influence is everywhere on the record.
The era
When we talk about Bieber, we don't mean Baby or Boyfriend. We mean the version of him that emerged around Purpose and matured through Changes, Justice, and the singles that came after — Stay, Holy, Ghost, Lonely, Peaches. The version where the production got quieter and the songwriting got braver. Where heartbreak stopped sounding like a single emotion and started sounding like a weather system.
That version of pop has been doing something interesting for years: it's been carrying grief without announcing it.
How grief sits inside modern pop
A lot of contemporary pop pretends to be about love. What it's actually about, often, is loss. The friend who isn't there anymore. The relationship that's already over but no one has said it yet. The version of yourself you can't get back. The song sounds like a love song. The lyrics sound like a memory.
If you listen closely to Ghost — the Bieber track, not ours — it's not actually a love song. It's a song about a friend who died. Most listeners hear the chorus and feel it. Very few people stop to notice what it's literally about.
This is the magic. Pop in this lane lets you smuggle weight inside warmth. The hook lifts you, the production glows, the chorus repeats — and somewhere under the surface, a quiet grief sits in the room with you.
That's what we wanted The Bones of Love to do.
Why it had to be pop, not dance
We've spent the last year writing house, trance, garage, classic revivals. All of those genres can carry feeling — anyone who's been in a room at 4am when a track lands knows this. But dance music carries feeling through the body. The bassline, the floor, the moment of collective lift.
The story we wanted to tell with this album isn't a collective-lift story. It's an interior story. One person, a name they keep saying, a room they keep walking into. That story sits closer to the voice than to the drums.
Pop — specifically this lane of pop — is built for the interior story. The voice sits forward. The arrangement holds space around it. The drums are present but never dominant. The listener gets close.
That's what we needed.
The production decisions
A few specific choices that shape how the record sounds:
- Voice-forward mixes. Every track puts the vocal at the centre. Drums and synths give it the room
- Warm synth pads over cold ones. Bieber's late-era records use pad textures that breathe like a room. We borrowed that
- Restrained drums. Trap-adjacent patterns but mixed quieter than convention. The drums hold the rhythm, they don't push it
- Gospel touches. Holy Ground opens with a soft choir entering. Ghost ends with a piano-and-vocal raw. Both are direct nods to how modern pop borrows from gospel for emotional weight
What you'll hear
Six songs, modern pop, voice-forward, gospel-touched, golden. If you love the Holy / Stay / Ghost / Peaches / Lonely corner of contemporary radio, The Bones of Love will feel like home immediately.
If your tastes lean more toward our dance work, Borrowed Beats is the closest thing we have to a "genre crossover" record — and Genre-blending in 2026 is our argument for why moving between lanes is what makes modern artists actually modern.
The Bones of Love is the lane we hadn't visited yet. Now we have.
Out 10 July.