There’s only one thing better than following your passion, and that’s following your passion with your friends. CCIITTYY, the newest electronic pop duo, is just that.
Jerome and Luuk are two friends who met during university in the Netherlands and recently formed CCIITTYY to explore electronic pop music. After the wild success of their first single, the duo has released their second single, ‘Need You Tonight’, which features heartbreaking melodies and bittersweet lyrics. CCIITTYY spoke to Four Over Four about their breakout success, developing their sound, and their early beginnings as a duo.
Congratulations on your newest single ‘Need You Tonight’! What was the process like making it? Are you happy with it?
Thanks! Need you Tonight all started with an early morning audio message from Jerome saying he felt inspired and felt like he might have written our new single. Listening to it, Luuk was totally blown away by the chorus, and agreed this would be the next one. We worked on the lyrics, and then some time went over it. We went on vacation and let our dreamed future tour manager Koen listen to it. He was impressed, but we felt like it wasn’t finished yet.
A week later Jerome set down with Harald Bruijstens to further work on the lyrics. It was a very emotional day in which the exact story behind the song was discussed to improve the lyrics. After that the song felt done, and it was time to finalize the production.
We’re very happy with how Need You Tonight turned out. It’s a song with a real beginning and ending. And we’re truly happy with how it sounds. Listen here:
You’ve said your style of music is all about the feels, and how the song moves the listener. How would you say ‘Need You Tonight’ is supposed to make the listeners feel? Did you work hard to evoke a specific emotion in this release?
We think music is all about emotion. When you listen to a song, it does something with your feelings. Happy songs might make you happy, and if you don’t like happy songs they might make you angry. Either way, music stirs your emotions.
Since the song is based on real life events, it were the feelings that were felt back then that we wanted to convey. Think of seeing an old 80’s movie with a melancholy love story without a happy ending, and how you feel afterwards. It was exactly this feeling.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves as individuals, and then as a team? How did the two of you meet in University and decide to start making music together?
Jerome is a guitarist, with an exceptional feeling for creating sounds. We used to call him The Sound. He then fell in love with producing. His childhood influences were 80’s bands like A-Ha and Toto. Luuk is a songwriter by nature. He used to play bass in a punkband for which he wrote the music. Luuk was heavily influenced by the melody and energy punkrock brings.
What unites us is a love for pop music. When writing we complement each other, knowing which parts of our own background could help in forging a pop song like Need You Tonight.
We met when Luuk tried to start a band. The guitarist did not show up at the first rehearsal, but the drummer, Ivo, knew another guy. This guy was Jerome, and from that very day we were a team. The band was a total flop, but we kept making music together. At first the plan was to write music for other artist. Then on a summer night in 2017 Jerome called Luuk to ask if we wanted to try for ourselves. Luuk said yes. CCIITTYY was born.
Would you say you have different sound influences, being from different countries (The Netherlands and Germany)? How do you blend your two styles, if you feel they’re different?
Luuk absolutely loves schlager music now that he lives in Germany. Just kidding. We don’t think there’s such a thing as borders in music anymore. The entire world of music is only mouse clicks away thanks to streaming services.
What have been your biggest difficulties in the music industry thus far?
Our last song was our debut, so we’re far from a household name, that can be a difficult position in contact artist who’ve been around for some time.
What do you hope to accomplish in this next year? Are there more releases to come?
We’ve made a list of things we want to achieve next year. First of all we want to release a lot more music, have one worldwide successful song and start doing live shows. We’re very ambitious, and feel that 2019 will be a great year for us.
