Sunrise Academy Are Trying Not to Miss the Field Trip.
The Dallas duo built their band around a friendship that started at summer camp. Now, with millions of people finding their songs and a debut album about growing up without losing yourself, Sunrise Academy are figuring out what comes next.
– WORDS BY CJ / PHOTOS COURTESY OF SUNRISE ACADEMY
Sunrise Academy started the way a lot of good things do: without much of a plan.
Julian and Yakob met at summer camp when they were kids. Years later, with Yakob living in College Station, Julian would make the drive down most weekends and the two would spend the summer making songs together. There was no grand strategy behind it. It was something they did because they liked being around each other and liked making things.
Whatever Sunrise Academy becomes from here, Julian is pretty adamant about the order of importance.
“I think whatever happens, it will always be our friendship first,” he says. “Nothing comes before that.”
For a long time, the band existed almost entirely within that friendship. Then they released “Peace of Mind,” made a video for it and, for the first time, really started pushing Sunrise Academy beyond their immediate world.
The response was difficult to ignore.
They began posting about the music, but also about themselves… two longtime friends who had grown up together and were now making records together. Some of those posts started pulling millions of views.
“That’s when we went full steam ahead,” Julian says. “It has always been serious, but it took a new level a couple years ago. We always knew it was special.”
That distinction matters because Sunrise Academy’s friendship isn’t some bit of mythology being added after the fact. It is pretty much the operating system for the whole project.
Even when “Dinner Date” began reaching an audience far beyond the people who already knew the band, Julian says the context never really disappeared. If anything, the friendship was part of why people were connecting with the song in the first place.
“We get messages from people all the time who say they can hear two friends having fun behind the music,” he says. “That’s the goal.”
Their new record, Don’t Miss the Field Trip, takes that history and puts it up against the much less entertaining business of getting older.
Sunrise Academy songs can initially feel almost aggressively upbeat. They are immediate, melodic and occasionally hyperactive. Listen a little closer, though, and that brightness tends to be covering something considerably more anxious.
“I think almost all of our songs are about being in that in-between state,” Julian says. “When you listen to them close enough, you realize almost every song has very melancholic lyrics.”
There is a lot of longing in Sunrise Academy. Not necessarily for childhood itself, but for the certainty and simplicity that adulthood seems very good at removing.
Their previous EP, Big & Strong, was partly about becoming men. On Don’t Miss the Field Trip, the question gets more complicated: what does becoming an adult actually mean, and what are you supposed to keep from the person you were before?
The title existed early. They knew they wanted to call the record Don’t Miss the Field Trip before every piece of the album had necessarily revealed what that phrase meant.
“Something about that felt beautiful,” Julian says.
From there, the theme emerged naturally. The album isn’t ten different versions of remember when we were younger. It is more interested in that odd period where your life keeps moving forward while part of your brain is constantly checking the rear-view mirror.
That contradiction also suits the way Sunrise Academy make music.
Despite the growing audience, there has been no sudden relocation to an expensive studio or attempt to turn the band into a larger operation. Most of the music is still made with a microphone, a laptop (or, more accurately, an extremely old PC) and whatever room they happen to be working in.
“We like intimacy,” Julian says. “There is an immediacy to the creation that you can’t get in a studio.”
There are collaborators they trust, and they aren’t opposed to working differently when a song needs it. But there is something about two people sitting together and figuring a song out that they are protective of.
“A nicer computer would be nice though,” he adds.
The limitations have probably helped define Sunrise Academy as much as anything else.
The pair have joked about an unofficial songwriting philosophy: one chord is enough, two chords is pushing it and three chords is basically jazz. It’s funny, but there is a genuine idea underneath it.
“We like simplicity,” Julian says. “Simple chords, simple lyrics. Not because it’s easier. It’s actually quite hard.” That simplicity takes work. A melody might sit around for a week or two before they are convinced it is right, and songs are built as much by removing things as adding them. More instrumentation doesn’t automatically make something feel more complete, and both have become better at recognizing when an idea is getting in the way of the song rather than helping it. “Sometimes we will add something and it just won’t work,” Julian says. “Not because it’s bad, but because the song rejected it.”
That restraint has become increasingly important as the band has started understanding what a Sunrise Academy song actually needs.
Julian points to “Dinner Date” as the point where they realized they had found something recognizable, although he can trace parts of that sound all the way back to their first song, “Wondering Why.” Melody is the constant, but beyond that they are deliberately leaving themselves room to change. Yakob comes from a more classically trained musical background, while Julian is still teaching himself more instruments, and both bring ideas into Sunrise Academy from projects outside the band. Julian makes films; Yakob has his own R&B project.
Rather than pulling them away from Sunrise Academy, those separate creative lives give them somewhere else to experiment. Filmmaking has shaped the way Julian thinks about storytelling, pacing and the visual world around the music, while Yakob can explore different structures and sounds in R&B before bringing some of that thinking back to the band. “Sometimes, it’s nice to step away and work on something else,” Julian says.
There is also Dallas, which sits underneath the music in ways that might not be immediately obvious. Sunrise Academy records can feel almost coastal; warm, loose and permanently somewhere near the end of summer but neither of them sees that as being at odds with growing up in Texas. Their voices carry a little of it naturally, with some Americana and twang creeping into songs that otherwise pull from West Coast pop. The landscapes matter too: open space, country roads, the stories and people around them. It gives the music a regional character without the band having to announce itself as specifically Texan, the kind of detail somebody listening in California or London might hear without necessarily knowing where it came from.
That background also feeds into the way they are approaching live shows. Sunrise Academy have done things in a slightly unusual order, building a substantial audience online before becoming a fully established touring band. It means people already know the songs before Julian and Yakob have had much opportunity to stand in front of those listeners and play them, which could easily make the first proper run of shows feel intimidating. Instead, they mostly see it as an advantage. Both have spent plenty of time around stages already: Julian grew up doing plays and musicals and spent time backstage because his mother performs with The Polyphonic Spree, while Yakob grew up playing with his church band. “We feel confident in conducting ourselves in front of crowds,” Julian says. “The cool thing about building an audience beforehand is that you get to sing the songs with them live.” For now, they are deliberately getting their feet wet, playing shows and learning what Sunrise Academy becomes in a room before the stages get much bigger.
That brings everything back to the album title. For Sunrise Academy, the field trip isn’t really childhood itself, or summer camp, or College Station, or any single memory they are trying to preserve. It is what is happening to them now. “The field trip right now is the journey we are about to go on with our band,” Julian says. “New songs, live touring and really elevating it to a new level.” At 25, both of them are dealing with the same tension that runs throughout Don’t Miss the Field Trip: life getting busier, responsibilities accumulating and the things that once happened naturally, seeing your friends, making things, having time to notice where you are, suddenly requiring a little more effort.
The record doesn’t pretend to have a solution to that. Its title works more like a reminder not to become so preoccupied with growing up that you miss the part you will eventually want to remember. For Julian and Yakob, that currently means holding onto the friendship that existed before anybody was listening, continuing to make songs together and paying attention while Sunrise Academy turns into something larger than either of them expected. Or, as Julian puts it, “get on the bus with us.”
