ABOUT
Willamette Week's
Best New Bands
of Portland 2022-2023
"The band has an astonishing ability to combine honesty and levity in a way that sounds both familiar and unique."
- Starly Lou Riggs, Eleven Magazine
"With wit and insight, Pool Boys weave their way through a tapestry of melodies, sharp-fanged, dissonant riffs and complex harmony."
- Justin Carroll-Allan, Willamette Week
"[Millennial Morse Code] has a pleasant, nonplussed surf rock vibe that’s periodically broken up by even more satisfying bursts of piercing guitars and complex harmonies. ... [it] establishes them as one of the city’s most exciting new bands"
- Jerad Walker, opb music
Pool Boys' debut LP Patterns is now out on vinyl and streaming! Order vinyl with Youth Riot Records.
Bio:
A reductionist view of Pool Boys’ music could claim four words: Loud guitars; pretty harmonies. Songwriters Emma Browne, Caroline Jackson, and Annie Dillon weave their varied pedigrees together to form a unique sound in Portland music. Pool Boys thrive in dualities - they live in the space where soft and sensitive gives way to grit and ire. Browne’s melodic guitar hooks and oft-spacey, oft-grungy textures are thoroughly supported by Jackson’s driving bass lines and lush layers of vocal harmonies. The four piece feels equally at home with dreamy art-pop outfits or with heavier punk bands.
After the three founding members were joined by Monica Metzler on drums in 2020, Pool Boys spent the following years intimately learning each other’s creative voices and honing their collective craft, culminating in their first full-length LP, Patterns.