Check Aly & AJ‘s beautiful photoshoot for StyleCaster and interview they gave.
— [x014] PHOTOSHOOT > Aly & AJ for StyleCaster
Aly and AJ are parked outside their recording studio in Los Angeles, joining a video call from their car as early afternoon sunlight spills across the dashboard. Aly — the older half of the eponymous musical duo she helms with her sister AJ — is fresh-faced and freckled, her tousled hair peeking over a relaxed white tee. She looks over often at AJ, who sits in the driver’s seat and sports an ocean blue sweater with a daisy stitched into its center. Birds are, quite literally, chirping in the distance.
It’s the first Monday of spring, so it’s only fitting that the sisters have embodied their city’s vernal energy. They also happen to be on the precipice of a new season in their own lives: A yet-to-be-announced album is officially on the way. “The songs are done. And we knew exactly what the songs were going to be,” AJ says, sharing that she and Aly picked 11 tracks for the new record. (Admittedly? “It might turn into 10.”)
Finishing touches are already well underway as the sisters speak from the parking lot. In fact, moments after our call, Aly, 33, and AJ, 31, would head into the studio for their penultimate day of post-production on their new LP before embarking on the North American leg of their tour in support of “A Touch of the Beat Gets You Up on Your Feet Gets You Out and Then Into the Sun,” their fourth studio album released in May 2021. The record, which marked their first full-length project in 14 years, landed just in time for what turned out to be one of the most sumptuous summers on record—before the dawn of the Delta variant sent us back, bewildered, into our homes. Yet for a time, “A Touch of the Beat” mirrored our joyous, if bumbling, return to the world.
Much of the record was set to the sprawling, sun-soaked landscape of Aly and AJ’s Southern California youth, with lyrics exalting the pleasures—and pitfalls—of human connection. On lead single “Slow Dancing,” the sisters relish in a familiar sense of longing after a period of solitude: “I don’t need anything fancy/ I just need me and you slow dancing/ Hell’s bending, keeping me captive/ Heaven’s here, it’s right where you’re standing,” goes the chorus. On the other hand, there are songs like “Personal Cathedrals”—a rollicking Americana-tinged track about landing at a lame Hollywood party only to leave early, capturing the jaded spirit of pandemic wallflowers everywhere.
A deluxe version of “A Touch of the Beat” arrived nine months after its initial release, giving the original record, the majority of which was written in 2019, a rare extended life of its own. This languid rollout was both a symptom and a gift of the stunted times we’re living in; but for Aly and AJ, touring finally brings this album’s enduring chapter to a close. “It doesn’t feel like it’s stale by any means to AJ and I, because we’ve only gotten to perform these songs maybe a half a dozen times in front of crowds over the last couple of years,” Aly says. “It does feel really exciting to us to be able to bring this out on the road.” First stop? Their very own California, of course.
