Subscribe
Headliners

AJR: All Grown Up

Headliner catches up with American sibling trio, AJR, whose sound is made up of many musical ingredients and genres: there’s pop, indie, trap, and much more in there - and it’s extremely good stuff. We discuss the quarantine period, the days of sharing a triple bunk bed, the band’s recent single, Bang, and that important 10,000-hour rule.

The three brothers of AJR have come a long way since their beginnings, to put it mildly.

“We started out busking in Washington Square Park [in New York City] with ukuleles and playing covers,” says Ryan Metzger, one of the three Metzgers that make up the trio.

“We made enough money doing that to buy Pro Tools and recording equipment, which we brought back to our living room, and we’ve been recording there ever since.”

In the wake of their recent new (and huge) single, Bang, it’s a musical journey that’s well worth listening to. AJR are somehow a blend of indie, pop and trap, and probably several more genres — I complain to Ryan that his are one of those bands that make a music journalist’s life rather difficult when it comes to pinning them down to a set of genres.

“I would hope so!”, Metzger says with a laugh. “All of my favourite bands were like that. How do you describe The Beach Boys? I guess that’s something we aspire to, to keep surprising people. Every time people expect a certain sound from us, we throw a wrench into it and take a left turn.”

I ask how the dynamic of being a band of brothers has been for Metzger, with siblings Adam and Jack Metzger.

“It’s been very beneficial,” he says. “We grew up together in a tiny apartment in New York City in a triple bunk bed. So we forcibly had to become close. Going around the world in a tour bus and little planes has just been a continuation of that.

“If you’re in a band with people you aren’t 100 percent comfortable with, frictions can come up quickly as people take jobs that aren’t theirs or aren’t their skillset, for example. You need to be comfortable enough to remind people what it is they are best at.”

I ask if another continuation of this has been the three of them quarantining together.

“Well I’m the older brother, and me and Jack (youngest) are living together in Union Square,” Metzger says. “Adam, the oldest, doesn’t even technically have a house right now because we were supposed to be touring this entire year, so he’s living with my dad for a little bit.”

Alongside the likes of Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish, Metzger is another big believer in the ‘10,000 hour rule’ — the idea that to become a master of your main skill, be it music or what have you, you need to surpass the 10,000 hours mark of work and practise to attain mastery.

“We went through a broadway phase, we went through a really hard hip- hop phase, a disco phase,” he says. “We were honing our skills and putting in our 10,000 hours before anyone was really listening to us, besides our high school friends.