By Zephyr Weinreich
This past Thursday, indie rock ensemble Boyscott played for an enthusiastic crowd at Swarthmore’s very own Olde Club. I dropped by before the show to chat with frontman Scott Hermo Jr., bassist and back-up singer Emma Willer, guitarist Tom Bora, and drummer Noah Dardaris. To readers hoping for some good gossip about behind-the-scenes rockstar divadom, I am’m sorry to report that Boyscott’s whimsical, easy-going exterior seems to rest on an equally whimsical, easy-going interior. Though a lengthy and meticulous soundcheck revealed how seriously the band takes the quality of their performances, an Olde Club staff member later commented that they’d been remarkably gracious and fun to work with. I sat down with Hermo and the others in what seems to me to be the perfect setting for a Boyscott interview: a circle of old adirondack chairs at the edge of the Crum Woods, gentle gray skies overhead, the sun just beginning to sink behind the trees. A transcript of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below.
Zephyr Weinreich: So, I’ve read every interview with you guys that I could find, and as far as I can tell, this question remains unanswered. Once and for all, let the people know: why ‘Boyscott’?
Scott Hermo [laughing]: To this day, I don’t really know. I had a BandCamp with that name, where I’d put my demos, but I’m not sure how I landed on that. My name’s in it, so that’s something, and I was a boy scout, but I don’t know if that’s really the connotation I was going for. I will say I really like the letter B. I know that sounds crazy, but I really mean it. In so many different fonts, it’s a cool letter. I think I always just wanted something that started with that. There you go.
ZW: So it was more about how the name looked than how it sounded?
SH: Yeah, to a certain extent, I’d say so. I really just like fonts and like how words appear to the eye.
ZW: Actually, something striking about Boyscott is that you guys have a highly distinctive aesthetic not only musically, but visually. How did the ‘Boyscott Look’ come about?
SH: [Emma Willer] and I studied film, and I think I was always interested in visuals and graphic design. As far as the specific visuals of our band, I don’t know…I think nature looks really cool with music. All of us in the band really like nature, and it was always a topic that was fun to write about and make music under.
ZW: Was there any media you’d consumed that helped to shape that aesthetic? What were the major influences, both within the realm of music and beyond it?
SH: Whenever I get asked this question, I think of this magazine that I once picked up when I was in high school. It was the New Yorker, and it had this incredible cover. It had Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, MGMT and Vampire Weekend. Those were basically all my favorite bands. I listened to a lot of typical indie rock, which was very formative for me. What I liked so much about that cover, though, was that it brought together these six bands, and they all had completely unique sounds. I mean, obviously everyone’s ripping off a little of someone, but I just thought it was really cool for these bands to have such distinctive vibes. With Boyscott, I wanted to try really hard to try to make something that was, potentially, distinctly our thing. I don’t know if I’ve quite gotten there yet, but I am getting there, I think.
Emma Willer: As far as non-musical influences go, we’re all film nerds.
SH: We all love movies.
ZW: Which movies in particular?
SH: You know, it’s funny, because, for the project we just recorded, we were watching stuff that wasn’t necessarily the vibe, but also, in a way, kind of was.
Noah Dardaris [laughing]: We watched Like Mike at one point.
SH [laughing]: Yeah, so not exactly the vibe. But we watched The Thing, we watched Blair Witch Project…
EW: A lot of thriller and mystery stuff.
SH: And then, a lot of people compare our stuff to Wes Anderson movies, which I do really like, and Goonies was also one of my favorites growing up. I like a lot of movies that take place in nature, too – adventure stuff.
ZW: The Orpheus Review is a college music publication, and Boyscott started out as a college music project, so let’s talk about ‘college music.’ What does this phrase, this concept, mean to you? How did the collegiate environment shape your music? How did your music shape your collegiate environment?
SH: I’m sure each college has its own distinct thing. For us, going to school in Nashville, there was a massive music scene. You’d think it’d be too huge, but it was actually only a positive. There were just so many house shows, every day of the week. There would be Monday house shows. Plus, there were a bunch of venues that were the perfect size – venues that fit about 100 people, which was just right for us. It was just wonderful. The dorm culture was great, too.
EW: Everyone played an instrument, even if they weren’t studying music.
SH [laughing]: Which meant people didn’t care if you were making noise.
ZW: Boyscott’s dorm-room origins clearly shaped the band’s stylistic sensibility – your music is a classic example of the uniquely 21st-century genre often called ‘DIY’ [Do It Yourself]. Nowadays, though, you’re able to record and produce your music in professional studio spaces, with equipment that certainly qualifies as hi-fi. How do you approach that? What does it mean to be a bedroom pop band that made it out of the bedroom?
SH: Honestly, I’m still navigating that. We worked with Noah’s older brother, Scoops [Dardaris], who’s an audio engineer, and it was a new, somewhat difficult process for me. I already had fleshed-out demos, but even still, there was this problem: I know how to get my sound in a really cheap way, but how do I get the same sound in a hi-fi way? You really do get a different vibe. Going forward, I’d like to mix the two even more. Maybe we do guitars specifically in a more DIY way, but have drums be more hi-fi. I think there’s a balance that’s hard to strike, but ultimately rewarding. I’ll always write in a DIY way – I’d be way too stressed out to leave that for when Scoops comes. That would be intimidating. But he also provides a studio environment that’s great. We actually did a lot of creative stuff in the studio space, and hope to do more.
ZW: A lot about the music industry has changed very rapidly over the past couple of decades. Between the rise of streaming and the dramatic increase in the availability of DAWs [digital audio workstations; apps like Garageband and FL Studio], what it means to be a musician today would be almost unrecognizable to musicians of the past. How has it been to navigate this new world?
SH: I can only answer from our experience. When we released the first record, Spotify was just beginning to be a thing. And, honestly, it only seems to have benefited us. Of course, Spotify and a lot of these companies can be really exploitative and terrible, but so far, we’ve been super fortunate. Having people have access to our music so easily has helped us to gain fans around the country, and the world, actually. So it’s only been a positive experience for us. We understand how fortunate we are for that. Our music is very, for lack of a better word, ‘streamable,’ and ‘playlistable,’ because it’s very accessible music – it’s not too crazy. But there are a ton of artists that I love that I think are the same way; they aren’t benefitting nearly as much, and I just don’t know why. So we’ve just been super lucky. And when it comes to the DAWs, that’s only positive. Having gear be accessible and being able to do it all yourself, it’s just amazing.
ZW: Possibly the most polarizing aspect of today’s music world is the importance of social media in achieving popularity. You guys have some pretty great social media content – is it something you enjoy?
SH: I think if you’re trying to do what we’re trying to do, which is full-time touring, it’s not really a choice. You kind of have to do it. It’s a lot of work, and it’s tough, but trying to strike a balance between churning out content and making visuals that are cool and interesting to you is super important. I know a lot of bands that are just forcing it, and I always think they’d be making better stuff if they were just having fun. Actually, Noah’s girlfriend is in a band called Shallow Alcove and they kill it with social media, which they do by making stuff that they genuinely like.
Even so, it’s always taxing. It’s a tool, and all artists go through phases of enjoying it and being completely sick of it. So it’s a gift and a curse. Probably mostly a curse. It’d be sick to not have to have to try to be an influencer constantly, even though it’s definitely cool to be able to reach people in such a technically easy way. It’s tough for us. None of us are the kind of people that want to be front-facing.
I would like to find a way to enjoy it more, because when I was in college I’d just make videos for fun. I’d make goofy, weird stuff – short films or funny video clips with my friends. Now I’d say it feels forced. But if we’re making cool visual stuff, I enjoy that, even though anything front-facing is kind of nerve-wracking.
ZW: Speaking of virality, as Boyscott has become more widely known, two of your songs in particular – “Nova Scotia 500” and “Killer Whale” – have absolutely blown up. So tell me: what’s it like to have a hit on your hands? Is it a blessing and a curse, or just a blessing?
SH [to the band, laughing]: Are you guys tired of playing any of the songs? I mean, I think there’s a balance. Honestly, I don’t think we’ve ever played a show without ending our set with one of these two songs – like, ever. Which means that you love it sometimes and are done with it sometimes.
EW: Once in a while, I’ll definitely be over playing a song. But then we’ll have a show where the crowd is so excited, and it makes me love the song again.
SH: I’m also totally down to give the people what they want, even if I didn’t like it. We’re so grateful to be able to do this.
EW: Yeah – we’re not necessarily playing it for us all the time.
SH: Sometimes we are, though. I enjoy playing all the songs, to be honest. On tour, we change up arrangements for most of our songs, which keeps everything fun. Also, though, I guess that’s what the album’s for. We have the older songs for the people that connect to that stuff, but then we have new things to share, too.
We’ve also been doing this for so long that, for the first four or five years of the band we were playing shows to no one, and only a couple of people would be stoked. So now it’s cool to play the songs for people that love them. I’m totally down for that. As you get older you change as an artist, and it’s like, well, would I have written this song now? Probably not. But I’m really grateful that we did and that I get to play it now.
At first when we released the record I was really self-conscious about the songs, because suddenly we were the band that opened up for the cool bands that came to town. Suddenly, I was being exposed to bands that were ten years in, five years in, that were so tight and so dynamic, and I was embarrassed of our music then. Fast forward five years, and I’m like, oh, no, we were doing it right the whole time.
ZW: Ever since the rise of ‘pop music’ transformed musicians from mere entertainers into focal points of public attention, artists and audiences alike have been split on the question of how this influence should be used. A lot of people, especially in recent years, have argued that anyone with a platform has a responsibility to leverage that platform for good, and speak out on behalf of those in need. Others say that musicians are still, first and foremost, entertainers, and that their politics don’t belong on stage. How do you approach this debate?
SH: I’ll start by saying that I don’t think of us as a band that anyone’s going to for information about politics. That being said, I do think that everyone who exists has a responsibility to talk about injustice. And sure, people are going to a show to relax, to be entertained, but I think there’s space for information that important almost 100% of the time.
EW: We’re also just very politically aware people, and it would feel wrong if we didn’t have a donation bin or something. It would feel inauthentic.
SH: I don’t think it takes up as much mental room as some of these bigger artists are saying. And I’ll say this: now that I’m at this age (we’re all older – late 20s, early 30s) I’m not looking to artists for information. However, when I was young and impressionable, those were the only people I was looking to. I got politically active through the artists that I admired. And then, after that, I was like, okay, let me actually read the news. But when I think about how formative those early concerts you go to are, I remember that, when people give you information from that platform, it could change your whole life. I think more than anything, it’s just really, really special when people who have those platforms use them in a brave way, and are informed, and try to help inform young people. It’s the silence that bothers me.
ZW: Before we go, I’d love to get some music recommendations for our readers. What have you guys been listening to?
SH: Well, we’ve been collectively listening to the new Alex G album, and Emma has a new record out with her band, Lazy Trail.
EW [laughing]: Yeah I’ve only been listening to my own album – gotta get those streams. No, I’ve been listening to a lot of Hand Habits, plus the new Wednesday.
SH: I’m saving the Wednesday for when I’m home. I’m so excited.
ND: I’ve been listening to Nathan Salsburg.
SH: We were just on tour with Another Michael – they’re out of Philly. It was such a joy to hear their songs every night. And I’ve just been listening to a ton of Chapell Roan, to be honest. I just can’t get sick of those songs. Like, really – I can’t get sick of them.
ZW: Which ones?
SH: I love “Casual.” When I put on “Casual,” I always want that song to keep going. But I literally love all of them. I love some of the ones I hadn’t heard before, like “After Midnight” or “Naked in Manhattan.” I hadn’t heard that one before, and I was just like, this is the best song that most bands would ever release in their whole careers, and for her it’s just a ‘whatever’ song. It’s just great.
Boyscott will be touring the U.S. in support of Summer Salt from January 2026 through March 2026 (back in Philadelphia on February 5th). Their most recent album, Spellbound, is available on all streaming platforms.
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