The Beaches on Breakups and Going to Therapy

The Beaches on Breakups, the Power of Fan Culture, and Going to Therapy

The Beaches know a thing or two about writing songs surrounding messy relationships—both sapphic and otherwise. “Blame Brett,” their breakout single from their 2023 album Blame My Ex, hit 100 million Spotify streams this June. The song chronicled the real-life breakup of Jordan and her ex, musician Brett Emmons, who she wasn’t afraid to name, not anticipating that the catchy track would take off on TikTok, catapulting the band—formed by sisters Jordan and Kylie Miller and Eliza Enman-McDaniel—into a level of fame they had yet to experience in their 15 years together. I suggest that it must have been strange for them, as a band that started during a cultural turning point for artists, when MTV’s death rattle was in full swing but social media wasn’t yet geared towards music promotion. Enman-McDaniel recalls an argument she had with her boyfriend nine years ago, after he suggested that the band start posting on social media. “I was like, no we don’t. We’re a band, we’re not influencers. And he was like, you don’t understand—the industry is changing.”

While some artists have a track blow up on TikTok and quickly get replaced by the next clippable moment, the Beaches’ viral moment wasn’t just a fluke. Fans who discovered the band via social media dove into their catalogue (they’re currently at 2.3 monthly listeners on Spotify), bought tickets to their tours, and flocked to their festival performances. “The experience still feels surreal to me,” Jordan says. “I didn’t accept it until we started playing bigger and bigger shows and people were singing the lyrics back, not just to ‘Blame Brett,’ but all the songs.”

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The Beaches’ recent success has taken them to new heights, but even in their early days as a teenage band, they were embraced by their homeland in Canada. Their music videos played in between programming on the country’s Family Channel and they performed the theme song for the teen sitcom Really Me. That hometown favor has carried into the present day—they just won their second Juno Award for Group of the Year—but they’ve also made their mark internationally, touring across America and Europe. They played Reading Festival for the first time in 2024, and they also made their Coachella debut this past April, joined by friend of the band, G-Flip, who they’ll be supporting on tour in Australia next winter.

Not just their friend, but a collaborator, too, G helped the band write and produce “Last Girls at the Party,” the electric final track on the Beaches’ new album, No Hard Feelings. “I think we were all a little nervous to write this new record after the success of Blame My Ex, and it was refreshing to go into the studio with a friend of ours,” Jordan says of working with G, noting that their musical process was a lot nerdier than she’d anticipated, as they came prepared with a whiteboard and devised a checklist of the different notes they needed the song to hit: “Anthemic, guitar solo, fast, a little gay,” according to Jordan.

“The G stands for genius. Genius flip,” multi-instrumentalist Leandra Earl says, laughing.

“When you’re in LA doing sessions every day, it can get so monotonous, but doing that session with G in that way was so fun and so creative,” Enman-McDaniel adds, noting that the whole song came together in an hour.

No Hard Feelings opens up with a tinny, grunge-y, ‘90s guitar sound on “Can I Call You in the Morning,” an apt introduction to the ambivalent theme of the record, reminiscent of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These varied feelings are a result of the four best friends’ unique approach to collaborative songwriting. Their lyrics are a blend of each member’s own personal experiences and their reactions to each other’s experiences. This mix of different perspectives makes the songs they write—about new love, messy breakups, regret, and everything in between—more layered. “Being in a band is about being collaborative. It’s about the collection of ideas working together to make art,” Enman-McDaniel says. “That goes to the music, but it should also go to the stories that you tell. We’re all just very interesting women who make crazy, stupid decisions that make really great music, you know?”

An example of that lives on this record in “Did I Say Too Much,” a remorseful song about Earl’s recent breakup. It’s endearing to hear how much these bandmates love and care for each other. Before Jordan even starts talking about how they wrote these songs to support Earl, the lyrics play in my head: “We both know the truth, that I’m a lot to lose.” The thought of a friend helping to write your breakup song and putting that line in it about you? May we all be loved like that. “It’s about Leandra’s perspective but it’s also, me, Kylie, and Eliza’s opinions on the relationship and how we’re trying to uplift our bandmate, especially if you listen to the bridge,” Jordan says. “It feels very anthemic but it’s us holding our bandmate close and saying, ‘We love you, you’re worthy of more than this.’”

Other songs on the record inspired by the same breakup take a lighter approach, like the tongue-in-cheek “I Wore You Better,” which boasts some of my favorite lines from the record, including the hilarious, “Do I have a sign on my back, ‘Poly girls ransack me until I’m left on empty’?”—which is made even more magnetic by Jordan’s electric delivery. Enman-McDaniel says the fun nature of “I Wore You Better” was intentional—that they didn’t want all of the breakup songs and queer songs to be too mellow. As hinted at in the lyrics, the song explores the painful experience of being treated like an experimental phase by a partner you’re fully invested in, which Earl notes is a common shared experience in the queer world. “There are so many different relationships that you can get involved in, especially coming out late. I feel like I’m still young in the queer sense and going through all these toxic relationships or ones where I should be asking for more and setting boundaries, so I get involved in these weird situations. It’s sort of empowering, like, ‘Okay, you chose something else, but we were really fun together.’ We were really good together.”

The messaging of the song bears a similar ethos to Chappell Roan’s blow-up single of last summer, “Good Luck, Babe!” But Jordan clarifies, “No one could ever write another ‘Good Luck, Babe!’” With a wink to Euphoria, Earl says, “When that song was released, I listened to it like six times in a row in bed and I was like, ‘Holy shit, is this fucking play about us?’” The Beaches’ candor when it comes to discussing their relationships, both in their music and in interviews, is part of what makes them so relatable. Before these breakup songs came to be, Earl was open about her new relationship when she appeared on her friend, lesbian influencer, and podcaster Shannon Beveridge’s podcast, exes and o’s (recently rebranded to Alphabet Club).

While some artists prefer to keep things private when they’re in a relationship, Earl says the sense of security she feels when in a relationship makes her feel more open, while the ending of one is where she fears getting personal in her writing. “I think when I’m in a relationship, I’m open to saying all the details because they like me. They’re still gonna date me. But I don’t want people to hate me,” she explains. “I’m scared to be vulnerable.” Jordan says she feels the opposite, a confidence we witnessed on “Blame Brett.” “I’m like, ‘Once we’re done, we’re done,’” she elaborates. “But during a relationship, I’m much more apprehensive to speak about my personal life.” When to discuss their relationship details isn’t the only place where Jordan and Earl differ—they also disagree on when to name names, but respect each other’s choices all the same. “She hates me right now,” Earl says of an unnamed ex she was torn on writing songs about. But she found that not using her name was a compromise, though Jordan is quick to remind her that she’s simply telling her side of the story—that all’s fair in love and war.

I ask them if they ever regret being so open about their relationships, especially with the weight of past partners hating their guts weighing on them. “It’s really tricky, because people deserve to have their private life, right?” Jordan says. “And so, when you’re dating somebody and you’re a musician, you’re like, ‘I have an obligation to myself and as an artist to write about my own experiences.’ But sometimes I forget about online bullying. Brett wasn’t the best boyfriend to me, but he didn’t deserve to be harassed, and he was.” While Leandra settled on not using names in songs about her ex, she almost considered naming her ex’s boyfriend, until Kylie reminded her that she’d regret it and have a panic attack.

This revelation comes from lived experience, when Earl wrote a song about another situationship of hers and texted Kylie the next morning, spiraling. The exercise of writing the song, which she says was called “Bad Actress,” was therapeutic, but the “novel” she sent Kylie proved she couldn’t actually go through with saying anything mean about an ex on a record. Part of their reluctance to get as personal as possible in their music comes from recognizing that with their popularity on the rise, more people are paying attention. As people who are prone to oversharing, they’ve had to reevaluate how they use social media to connect with fans. As a group of four best friends who are constantly discussing their personal lives, sometimes they forget there’s an audience listening in or a third party present. Earl admits to spilling too many details in interviews or posting too much personal information in an Instagram story, forgetting that it’s not just her friends who follow her.

Moments later, Enman-McDaniel confesses, “I literally forgot we were doing an interview.”

“I know. We’re dangerous,” Earl laughs.

Another unexpected side effect of their breakout success is their new status as role models, a common symptom for any celebrity in a day and age where the fan experience goes far beyond simply liking someone’s music. Their self awareness about their imperfections and the impostor syndrome they’ve been feeling inspired songs on the new record, like the dreamy, pleading “Jocelyn,” which features vulnerable lyrics asking not to be placed on a pedestal. “I think that when you have the viral success that we did—and I do it too—people seem to forget that you’re still a human. You’re still gonna make mistakes,” Enman-McDaniel says. “We had this success with ‘Blame Brett,’ and then people were looking to us for all the answers, and we didn’t have them because we don’t have them for ourselves.” Jordan adds, “People were like, ‘This song is helping me with my divorce.’ And I’m like, I’m still sleeping with Brett on the side, I’m such a liar.”

Then there are songs like “Lesbian of the Year,” a reflective ballad that’s far more melancholic than the title suggests, written about the pressure Earl has felt to be a beacon to the queer community. Heavy is the head that wears the lesbian crown, especially as someone who is only five years into embracing their own queerness and still learning as she goes. “In my DMs, I have a lot of people coming out to me and no one else in their life knows,” she says, adding that she appreciates fans’ willingness to open up to her but that the heavy topics can be a lot to put on one person. “My parents are still coming to terms with [my queerness]. I’m not living in a perfect world. I don’t have all the answers.” Jordan offers an affirmation to her bandmate, “I think even just saying that out loud and writing a song about that experience really resonates with a lot of people.”

Earl agrees, adding that her mom specifically asked her to not include a line on the song about her questioning if she’ll still end up with a man. She refused, because the line is relatable. “Well Mary, stop asking,” Enman-McDaniel laughs. But Earl says she doesn’t blame her mom, acknowledging that societal expectations are to blame, and that her coming out was a big change for everybody, including herself. Jordan adds, “I like to say this: Everybody does the best they can with the resources they have at the time, and all you can do is try and be a better, more compassionate person, which your mother for sure is.”

The Beaches haven’t let the hard parts of navigating celebrity and fandom weigh them down too much. In fact, they spent the summer making a concentrated effort to connect with fans up close and personal at their “Last Girls at the Party” DJ set parties. At the party stop in Brooklyn, they’re accessible to all their fans, holding casual convos with anyone who wants to start one, including a fan who drove up from DC with a broken leg just to get them to sign her crutches. “We’re just hanging out. We’re just girls doing shots,” Leandra jokes, but it’s true: Hanging out with Enman-McDaniel and Earl in the backyard of Ginger’s, we trade stories of the coolest celebrities we’ve met at different festivals and shows, and it’s charming to realize that these girls are so down to earth, they haven’t quite grasped that they’re now the cool celebrities in these stories to the people at their parties.

While the Beaches’ breakout single was famously about not wanting to take accountability for their own destructive patterns in relationships, it’s safe to say that, in the last two years, they’ve finally come around. A recurrent theme on No Hard Feelings is accepting responsibility for their own mistakes, even if that mistake is simply putting too much faith into somebody who didn’t deserve it. “It was a little more difficult to write this record for that reason, because it’s hard to look at yourself and ask, ‘Am I contributing to kind the chaos in my life a bit?’” Jordan admits.

High-energy songs like “Takes One to Know One” are unflinchingly self-aware, with lyrics about meeting your non-committal, maladjusted match and trying to one-up them (“God, you’re a piece of work / Oh, takes one to know one”), while reflective tracks like “Sorry For Your Loss” are quietly apologetic underneath the guise of being self-congratulatory. “Yeah, we’re all in therapy now, I don’t know if you could tell,” Jordan laughs. But perhaps my favorite part of the record is that it celebrates every iteration of healing, accepting that journaling and meditation aren’t the only paths, and that, sometimes, partying and kissing someone new is the best way to move on. The sweet spot is a combination of both approaches, finding the balance between the quiet parts of looking inward and getting outside of your head. “Drinking a lot of lagers, kissing a lot of people, getting strep throat. And going to therapy and remembering to take your meds,” Earl jokes. “Sometimes you get a little depressed and you don’t want to take them. But it’s so nice when you do take them.”

Kylie agrees. “It just kind of connects—you find that balance. I’m going through a breakup right now and I’ve been going out every day, but eventually, that’s just not gonna feel the same. It’s not gonna fill that void. But it’s also summer, so I actually legally have to go.”

I joke that since we’ve been losing lesbians, Kylie may have to try some new things, which sparks Earl to ask her to hard-launch—a joke, since the best friends kiss so often that some fans who follow them on Instagram have actually speculated that they’re secretly dating. But in spite of their fans misled opinions’ on their dating lives and the pressure of being their role models, the Beaches are deeply grateful to have a loyal and dedicated fanbase, and appreciate the way that fan commitment contributes to how musicians perform on the charts. It’s a culture that can make or break a band. “Young girls and people who are fans of music are kind of controlling the music industry,” Jordan elaborates. “That’s why Chappell blew up. That’s why Sabrina [Carpenter] and Charli [XCX] succeeded.” Enman-McDaniel argues that those are the people who should be in charge, that “it should be the consumer’s choice.” “The girlies are the reason why the Beatles are so massive,” Jordan interjects. I tell the band that, when I type “The Beaches” into a streaming app, the Beatles are the only other band that comes up. “Oh, that was intentional,” Jordan jokes. “That’s the one savvy move we ever made.”

Watch the Beaches’ Paste Session from 2019 below.

The Beaches on Breakups, the Power of Fan Culture, and Going to Therapy

While some artists have a track blow up on TikTok and quickly get replaced by the next clippable moment, the Toronto band's new album, No Hard Feelings, proves their viral moment wasn’t just a fluke.