Growing up loud with The Beaches

The last time I saw the Toronto four-piece live was almost two years ago. Back then, they were headlining rooms the size of the one they’re now using for an after-party (or, I guess in this case, a pre-party). Now, clubs are just warmups for the main event.

The mood is celebratory; friends and fans and family members of the band are riding high, and the night goes the good kind of long. After all, there’s lots for The Beaches to be celebrating right now. The next day, the band — made up of siblings Jordan and Kylie Miller alongside guitarist Leandra Earl and drummer Eliza Enman-McDaniel — will play to 30,000 people on Osheaga’s main stage. When I finally talk to them, they’re back in Toronto, just barely getting over the hangovers (emotional, perhaps literal) of the days before.

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Osheaga is, arguably, Canada’s flagship music festival and draws the biggest names of the year to play in front of massive crowds. People trek from across the country and around the world to revel in the Montréal summer buzz for a weekend. For a group like The Beaches to work its way up from Toronto dive venues to Osheaga’s main stage is no small feat, and the honour of a slot like that going to a homegrown artist only makes the moment sweeter.

“Genuinely, I think that was one of the best nights of my life, for real," guitarist Kylie tells me. "It was so crazy. That was something that we’ve wanted to do for a really long time. It was just so incredible. I think we’re all just really grateful." She cuts herself off before she gets teary: “Oh my god! Not me almost crying.”

Watching The Beaches grow exponentially over the past few years has been both dizzying and gratifying. In the days before their Osheaga set, photos circulate around the Internet of a 2014 performance at the festival. The crowd, for one thing, was a fraction of the size of the one they played to this year, and the band themselves were such different versions of who they are now. “We’ve all changed and grown as people. We were such babies in that photo. I had a little fedora on,” keyboardist Leandra recalls, laughing. “The confidence with which we play now on stage is so different. We’re so in sync, and it’s cool to come back and play a festival as a grown adult and a mature band with an actual fanbase.”

“It was just so surreal,” drummer Eliza adds. “We can’t even believe that crowd. And people were singing not only to stuff like ‘Blame Brett’ but also to the deep cuts. It was so cool to see.”

The band’s growth seemed to happen slowly and then all at once, and Osheaga was just the latest in a line of massive successes that have included Coachella and breakout song “Blame Brett” topping 100 million streams. Casual listeners would be forgiven for thinking of them as an overnight success: the band that made “Blame Brett” and hit it big after that. But the reality of the band’s story goes far deeper than that. The band went through several label contracts and management teams and years of grind-it-out touring to get where they are now, almost even giving up. Had things gone differently, their second album – 2023's Blame My Ex – could very well have been the end of The Beaches’ story. Instead, it was the start of a new one. If anything, they tell me, it’s because of those years of pounding the pavement that they were able to capitalise on the success of “Blame Brett” when it happened.

“Because we’ve been touring so much, it’s sort of felt to us like a slow, gradual incline, and now it doesn’t feel as scary, even though if you do look at it objectively, it did suddenly change and happen quite fast,” singer and bassist Jordan tells me. “If you look at it in terms of year to year, it does feel like a big jump. But because we’ve been playing so many shows, it didn’t feel as intense, I guess.”

To their credit, The Beaches' work ethic is near unmatched. They don’t seem — at least externally — to bat an eyelid at a touring and press schedule that’s booked back to back-to-back, but part of that is a result of waiting so long.

“Given the timing of when ‘Blame Brett’ happened, we had been touring constantly before that song went viral, playing in grimy bars and doing that sort of thing. We’re perfectly at home in that sort of setting — we’ve just spent so much time there. That’s one thing I think we have over the overnight viral TikTok successes that haven’t played a show before. It got us really solid as a band,” Eliza explains.

As post-pandemic industry trends have made clear, the gold rush of social media virality isn’t all that it’s often made out to be. Without a solid foundation, repeat plays on an app stay hollow statistics and often don’t translate into real-world success. Just look, for example, to the numerous arena tours by cancelled under conspicuous circumstances. Moving a viral sensation into a career act is a harder jump than it looks, but it’s a jump The Beaches are making and with third album No Hard Feelings, they’re sticking the landing.

“We’ve been working on [this record] pretty much since Blame My Ex came out,” Kylie says. “We wanted to strike when the iron was hot, and we figured that we should get a head start on engaging with the fans because we had never seen that kind of viral success, so we wanted to make sure that there was music coming.”

No Hard Feelings is the mature older sibling to Blame My Ex. Both records find their sonic roots in new wave-inspired guitars, anthemic melodies, and sardonic storylines. It's a record built on the world established by Blame My Ex but expands the aperture, pulling beyond the experiences of frontwoman Jordan Miller and onto all four members of the group equally. Musically and lyrically, No Hard Feelings feels more confident and more self-assured. It’s still messy and fun, but that mess is owned in a way that only comes with age and experience, and it’s propped up by genuine emotional intelligence as much as it is by wit and sarcasm.

Part of that continuity was simply because of the timing, with the band writing No Hard Feelings so soon after releasing Blame My Ex. But a lot of it was intentional, too.

“I think a lot of artists do a disservice to themselves after achieving a hit or having a successful record by following it up with something that’s completely different," Jordan explains. "You can alienate a lot of the fans that you’ve gained with this one particular sound. But more importantly, for us, we had finally found this really great new sound on Blame My Ex, and we really weren’t ready to abandon it yet. We wanted to keep diving into it and exploring that moody chorus pedal, Cure-y guitar vibes with the pop girl voice on top. We felt so enthusiastic and excited about finally getting that sound that we weren’t ready to completely abandon it yet with this next album.”

As the Blame My Ex period crossfaded into the next, then-amorphous album cycle, songs came naturally from gossip sessions and debriefs. Part of the magic of The Beaches is that they really are just best friends; no marketing ploy needed. Being in a band is perhaps one of the most unique psychological experiences possible, and staying in a band, if not managed properly, can be hard to do. Take Oasis, perhaps the talk of the summer, who went through years of sibling strife that jeopardised their entire musical project, at least up until this year. The Miller sisters — alongside Leandra and Eliza — are almost a direct foil to that dynamic.

“We really should be sick of each other," Jordan says. "We just took a month off, and just to show you how close we are, at least once a week I would still see these bitches for a drink. I feel a little vacant when I don’t get to see them all the time."

Unpacking the strength of those relationships — through both good and bad — was central to what Jordan wanted to achieve as a songwriter with No Hard Feelings. She was inspired, by Sex And The City: the messiness of it, the romance of it, and, above all, the way the intense love between four best friends can shape an entire life. In one of the show’s final episodes (the original, that is), Mr. Big has a heart-to-heart with Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha while he’s trying to win Carrie back. Over lunch, he looks to the three of them and says: “You’re the loves of her life, and a guy would be lucky to come in fourth.” The Beaches operate in the same way.

“It’s really inspiring to see a show written about four women who are really complicated and who each have a really interesting perspective on life." Jordan says of her relationship to the show. "I also just really love how the show investigates their relationship with each other. That’s something that tickles my brain a lot."

Trying that method of storytelling was something she wanted to do with No Hard Feelings: “It’s not just writing about a breakup or about Kylie like yelling at her boyfriend at four in the morning and then calling immediately to apologise,” she continues, referencing the inspiration behind “Can I Call You In The Morning?", the record’s opening track. “It’s also about, how does this make me feel about Kylie? And how do the other girls feel about this relationship or this thing she’s going through?”

Perhaps the best example of this dynamic comes on “Did I Say Too Much,” a song written about a secret-ish relationship Leandra had with a closeted woman last year. The whole affair was, the band tells me, pretty devastating, and “Did I Say Too Much” was written not just to unpack it but also to serve as an affirmation to Leandra from her bandmates that she was worth more than she was being given. “By the bridge, we’re really kind of giving it to her ex,” Jordan explains. “It’s almost like we the band are acting as a Greek chorus, being like: ‘No, you’re in the right, you’re worthy of love, you’re better than this, and we want more for you.’”

“You can hear us basically behind Leandra," adds Eliza, "supporting her and screaming at this girl through the song. [The whole album] very much has this energy of each girl has a story. She has a plot. Each one has a voice and experiences. It’s kind of a choose-your-fighter type thing. We just wanted to embrace that."

Writing sessions, as a result, got knee deep in the intimate, the wild, the amazing, and the ugly. That the band started the project in their first year of getting the real “rockstar treatment” helped. There were songwriting trips to LA, wild nights out and dates that turned into all-nighters that bled straight into studio sessions. There were gossip circles about sex dreams about Jeremy Allen White and rogue sightings of exes. “It’s fun when we go out and we’re just kind of our crazy selves and come to the studio the next day with insane stories,” Leandra says. No Hard Feelings, they all agree, became a better record for it.

Of course, this kind of unabashed honesty and commitment to the autobiographical bit can have its downsides. Several songs on the record deal with the strange pressures that come with being in the public eye. While musicians certainly sign up for a life of putting their art and their personas out there, where the obligation to be available to the public ends and a private life begins continues to be a topic for debate. Awareness around the boundaries artists need to have — both for their own sanity and, arguably, for the strength of their art — has been raised by the likes of Chappell Roan and Blondshell.

Two songs on the record address this head-on. "Jocelyn" comes straight from Jordan’s perspective and deals with the imposter syndrome of having scores of fans idolising her and looking to her for advice post-“Blame Brett.” She had been working at becoming a successful musician for years, but becoming a role model was an entirely different domain. The new responsibility, she tells me, was both wonderful and terrifying. As she was on the way up in her career, she was also battling a mental health crisis in her personal life. In that state, the idea that anyone would look to her as some kind of pillar became impossible to reconcile: imposter syndrome at its most textbook. “Jocelyn” deals in that dichotomy, unpacking how it felt to be perceived as powerful when privately she was feeling quite the opposite.

Wanting to have a real person in the song, the group picked the name and subsequently found a fan on Instagram with the same one. A lot of the details that make the song so compelling — the PhD, being away in Iowa — are pulled from real information they found on her profile.

“Shortly after the Blame My Ex album came out, we did a meet and greet thing, and every day people were saying things like ‘Oh, you got me through my divorce’ or asking for all this life advice for these crazy things. But, we’re really just girls. Like, I don’t even know what I had for breakfast today,” Eliza tells me. “[Jocelyn] was just our way of framing that into a song.”

“Sometimes it would be like, we love that this music speaks to you … But again, we happened to write this breakup song that went viral, and we still don’t have all the answers,” she continues.

Another song “Lesbian Of The Year,” pulls from the same thematic well as “Jocelyn” but is framed distinctly around Leandra’s perspective. Perhaps the most introspective song on the album, it details Leandra’s coming out colliding with the The Beaches' rise, and how it felt to put her sexuality in the spotlight at a time when she was still working through it herself. Having come out later in life, the experience was dizzying, exhilarating, joyful, and, at times, isolating.

Leandra name-checks some sage advice from Tegan Quinn that helped get her through it, helping her know she was never too late for her own life. But even as she was figuring all this out on her own, she suddenly became expected to have the answers for others, a mantle she was honoured to take up but that she also came with its own pressures. “I think I’ve become almost like a spokesperson for the community," she tells me, "which I love and have obviously taken that on. I love supporting the community. But, some of the messages I get or the questions or even the boundaries that are broken in person, the parasocial relationships people think they have with me, sometimes can be too much."

During our conversation, Leandra reiterates repeatedly that she’s always doing her best to help whoever she can through representation and small interactions, and it’s clear that balancing this altruism – even in times where she still needs to help herself – weighs heavily. She even tried for a while to answer every DM and message – but as they piled up, she just ended up feeling guilty. Now, Leandra has made her peace with it and is finding her own comfortable middle ground, though it's taken years of practice.

“Nobody can do all that!" Jordan interjects. "She’s strong, but she’s not that strong.”

“It’s a healthy boundary!" Eliza adds. "It’s a good thing to talk about. Everyone needs a boundary."

“I think the writing about it and putting it into music is generally the best way of helping people,” Leandra concludes.

Queer representation has, nonetheless, become an important guiding pillar for The Beaches, particularly on No Hard Feelings. On the last record, they put out their very first song from a queer perspective, “Edge of the Earth,” based on one of Leandra’s earlier relationships. She had recently come out to her bandmates and wanted that experience highlighted on their record. While Jordan has identified as queer for even longer, she hadn’t always written about it but with the success of “Edge of the Earth” and a new queer fanbase finding their songs, they’ve were emboldened to tell those stories even more.

“It was natural because of the way we approach songwriting,” Jordan says of having more overtly queer songs on No Hard Feelings. “We do a debrief in the car and somebody will have a story or a spicy bit of tea or be going through a bad breakup or something. Unfortunately for Leandra, she was really going through it this year. Sorry, babe!”

“Also, aside from that, we didn’t want to have, like, one token queer song,” adds Leandra. “Especially now that our audience is a lot more queer heavy, if I may, we didn’t want it to just be, ‘Here’s your one gay song!’ It just is natural to have those different perspectives. I mean, we’re four different people.”

Most of the actual recording of No Hard Feelings took place in Toronto — alongside producer Gus Van Go — which still serves as the band’s home base. “We prefer working in Toronto,” Kylie explains. “We like having our people around us when we’re being creative. A lot of our friends will pop in the studio and have beers with us while we’re working. It’s really fun to be able to do that.”

Toronto itself has very much become synonymous with The Beaches. Where many groups make it big in Canada and quickly flee for New York, Los Angeles, or London — a creative brain drain, of sorts. As an artistic hub, Toronto sometimes gets the short end of the reputational stick. That a band is from Toronto — or Canada at all — can be an afterthought in their messaging and branding. Which is a shame, because the city is undeniably home to some of the world’s best talents and brightest stars. But there’s something about the success of The Beaches that feels like they are helping to flip that script on a wider scale.

The Beaches choosing to stay so proudly has centred their hometown as an integral part of their story. Even their name pays homage to the Toronto’s iconic east end neighbourhood, The Beaches, nestled on Lake Ontario in what feels like a village within a city.

“We found such a great team that we love here — our management team, makeup, stylist, creative. Everyone we really love working with — like, genuinely — lives here. So, it just makes it all the more reason to stay here, especially with friends and family. It’s a really great community in Toronto,” Leandra explains.

And their love for the city is often returned in kind. “It’s awesome with places that we’ve been going for years. Like, we’ve been going to this bar Pennies in Toronto for years, and every once in a while, they’ll play our songs or toss us a beer or something, and it feels really special when that stuff happens,” Jordan adds.

That hometown hero treatment has also been translated into some of the group’s biggest achievements and shows to date. They’ve won, for example, the Juno Award for Group of the Year the past two years in a row. Last year, they played to a packed house at Toronto’s 16,000-cap Budweiser Stage. This fall, they’ll be one-upping themselves with a date at the city’s Scotiabank Arena, which seats almost 20,000. To put this all in perspective, consider that when The Beaches started well over a decade ago, the group’s main gig was playing a weekly midnight slot at The Supermarket, a tiny dive bar in Toronto’s downtown core.

“I was driving past the Scotiabank, and it just feels so surreal,” Jordan says on booking the gig. “It hasn’t computed yet. And I think it won’t really feel real until it gets closer. That’s the way I’ve felt for a lot of these bigger shows. I just sort of don’t think it’s happening until a week away.”

Still, after working day in and day out, the success they’ve finally found has been earned many times over. Their ambition for even more is palpable, but so is their belief in themselves. No matter the nerves or the pressure or the stage fright, The Beaches seem to know that they can get the job done.

“Well, you know, we’ve been doing this for 15 years. We learned a thing or two,” Jordan says cheekily. “But,” she adds, “there’s still a lot to learn.”