Racecourse Conversation
by Owen Mahoney
13 March 2026
Can everyone introduce themselves?
Reya: Hi, I’m Reya and I sing.
Jackson: I'm Jackson, and I play guitar. I sing too sometimes.
Joaquin: I'm Joaquin. I do all the synthesizers and electronics.
Jackson: And we're missing Graeme, who plays guitar and bass, and Ben, who drums and recorded, mixed, and mastered the record.
Where are they at now?
Jackson: Ben is in Santa Cruz and Graeme is in Long Beach.
Joaquin: We just graduated from UC Santa Cruz.
Reya: That’s where we all met.
How are you guys making music back and forth if a couple people aren't here?
Reya: Well, we've only lived here since November. Prior to that, we were business as usual, but we're still figuring out the bicoastal situation.
Jackson: The plan is to get back into gear once Graeme's here. We recorded this thing and didn't expect anything to happen at all. We just put it on Spotify, and were ready to move on with our lives. Now, we are reassessing our place.
Joaquin: It was a ceremonious thing we did. We were like, “We have to wrap this project up. We have been working on it for 3 years.”
How did you guys all meet, and how did the band form?
Jackson: That's a good question. Joaquin and I have lived together for the past–
Joaquin: Three years. Four.
Jackson: Four years. He used to play in this jazz band, and one of the guys who lived at the house they would practice at was Graeme. Then, all three of us started playing together
Reya: It was them four at first, and then I joined a few months later.
Jackson: Then, Ben joined about two years in.
Reya: When I joined, we didn't have a drummer.
Jackson: Yeah, it was kind of a joke.
Would you use drum machines?
Jackson: No. It was originally more of, like, an ambient-style project.
Joaquin: But they were still full songs.
Reya: It was definitely a lot more ambient/experimental.
Joaquin: We were droning out for a long time. We were trying to find a drummer, and we tried a few different people, and we finally found Ben.
Jackson: Yeah.
Joaquin: It all clicked into place.
Jackson: Ben is a jazz guy and recording engineer.
That's super cool. I am remembering one song, towards the end of the album that is more ambient.
Jackson: Oh, Bruce Lee? That was our first song.
Joaquin: They all used to sound similar to that one.
What is the significance of the months in the album title and the couple of song titles?
Reya: Adele-May is my sister's middle name. That song is about my little sister. July, December is because we recorded it in July, and then it took us until December to release it. The chorus to the actual song July, December was written after the fact.
Jackson: That song before felt a bit confused. It felt like it was building up to nothing.
Reya: Originally, I had a little dance that I would perform at that part.
Joaquin: She came up with that, the chorus, while we were in New York in my bedroom.
Jackson: I wanted to call it The Swimmer. We struggle with naming things. Not a single song had names for the longest time, and we just called it whatever band it sounded like. We still refer to Pennybox as Lilys because it sounded like that one Lilys song. Then in a day, we were like, "Guys, we're about to put the album out. We need to name these songs.” Our set list used to be just a shit show because everybody would have different names for everything.
When you finished it, did it take a while because you had to send mixes back and forth?
Reya: Yes, it was just a lot of mixing notes back and forth.
Jackson: Also, because Ben was in California, we couldn't mix all in a room together. He would send mixes all the time, and we'd just try to tweak little things.
Joaquin: He's great, but I was getting so frustrated that I tried to mix it, and then I was like, "Guys, I just wanna do it." And everyone was like, "Whoa. Pump the brakes." I mixed the whole album on my own, but I did a terrible job.
Reya: We recorded it in three days.
What did the recording setup look like?
Joaquin: We did it in a cabin.
Jackson: My parents and all their friends have this little cabin commune situation that's by the Yuba River. We went out there, and we brought all our own stuff. We just mic’d everything up with SM57s. Very DIY setup. Graeme's dad works in the art department at the community college in Long Beach, so we brought a couple mics from him.
How did you make the cover art?
Reya: I made the cover. It's just photos from an Amtrak trip pieced together. My camera has a panoramic setting where you can glitch it out to take random shots and piece them together into one bigger, final version.
Jackson: We were going from Reya’s parents' house from San Diego to LA to visit friends. As soon as I got off the train, I got punched in the face.
What, why?
Jackson: No reason.
Reya: We got off at Union Station in LA and were in the park by Union Station getting a taco, when some guy just came up and punched him in the face.
Jackson: Completely unprompted. I didn't say a word to the guy.
Reya: We were like, "Oh, no. Okay, let's walk away."
It’s cool you took the train out there, that’s uncommon.
Joaquin: No, it's beautiful.
Reya: Amtrak's the way to do it.
Jackson: It is beautiful.
Reya: It’s cheaper than gas.
What do Racecourse practice and recording sessions look like?
Reya: We would practice in Graeme's garage.
Jackson: We would practice on my bed also. The three of them would sit on the bed, and I would stand. It's like a circle bed. We didn't wanna pay for a place to practice. Graeme and I would often write guitar parts and bring them in, and then we would all kind of just riff and stuff. Rhea would often take a voice memo and bring it home, yeah?
Reya: Yeah. I would. I feel like most of the songs came from just vibing out and jamming. I would be like, "Da, da, da, da," and take a voice memo to come up with a better part later. The writing process was a lot of building off of each other in the moment. It would have different iterations until the album.
Joaquin: We sat with the songs for a while, so for me personally, I would forget what I did, and then I would have to come up with something again. I sort of loved how I got to record it all in the room with everyone else.
How did you guys fit all the stuff up there?
Reya: There was times I was placed behind two amps in a corner just enough to stand so it wouldn’t feedback
Jackson: We didn't have a PA system. I had a drum kit in my bedroom, and Graeme and I would sit on the floor, and then these two would just sit on the bed, and we would go at it until our roommates were like, "You guys have to stop."
Are you guys playing shows soon?
Jackson: We're working on some tours this summer. We're shooting two videos, which is gonna be fun.
Reya: We wanna do some sort of California tour.
Joaquin: Side note, we recorded it pretty much live. We got some swag points for that, I think.
Jackson: We would do ten takes of a song and then take the best one.
Follow Racecourse on Instagram. Listen to July, December on Spotify and Apple Music.