About BOO
"Husband and wife team Battery Operated Orchestra make pumping 8–bit electronica — sounds like a salacious headline in a crap newspaper, but is in fact awesome."
– Fresh On The Net
BOO are Brigitte Rose and Chris Black. Born in Tasmania and Scotland respectively and united by their love of synthesizers and perfect three minute pop songs, they met in a dank practice room in Kings Cross London in 2010, and have been making “highly charged electronica with incredibly addictive melodies” (Louder Than War) ever since.
They migrated to Brighton to create their debut album ‘Incomplete Until Broken‘. Described as “pulsating pumping electronica with cold, clear soothing vocals, recalling Ladytron” by High Violet. Reviewers across the land compared BOO to the likes of Stereolab, Crystal Castles and Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Their second album ‘Radiation’ garnered further critical acclaim and built on their solid synthpop credentials. After the success of their third album ‘Snare’ (a Bandcamp Essential Release), they released a limited edition remix album featuring work from contemporaries Finlay Shakespeare, midierror, Matt Culpin (Dancing with Ruby, Northern Kind) and more.
Recorded before and during lockdown, their fourth studio album ‘Yesterday Tomorrow and You’ was written as a survival handbook for the future in four chapters. Louder Than War dubbed it “the pinnacle of their career to date”.
In 2022, to celebrate ten years of BOO, the band started a monthly livestream called ‘BOO-cast‘ documenting progress on their fifth studio album Compulsory Games, which became #45 in Louder Than War’s albums of the year, exclaiming it “restores faith in British synth-pop.” The album was written, recorded and completed in full view of their monthly viewers of BOOcast, where they shared writing and production techniques as well as doing live performances of songs and reviewing the synthesizers they used on the album.
In 2024 they released This Is Not The End, a largely instrumental collection of previously unreleased tracks from EPs which were only available to BOO’s subscribers, known affectionately as “the BOOsters”.
BOO’s work encompasses every aspect of music production, from designing and making their CDs and videos to creating lighting and video art for their visceral live shows. Their music has been supported by BBC radio, WFMU and many other fine stations across the world.
"Melancholic synthpop with a polished atmosphere that never loses it's sense of human scale."
– Bandcamp Essential Releases
Read our statement on why we’re no longer on Spotify.
PRESS
“One will be hard-pressed to find a better representation of left-of-centre pop music from these shores”
– Sun 13
“Quirky… thought provoking, an act capable of making you move whilst always remaining unpredictable”
– Louder Than War
“What Blondie would have sounded like if they had hung out in 1970s Sheffield rather than New York”
– Fourculture
“It’s electro pop so good it sends shivers down parts of the spine other bands cannot reach.”
– The Devil Has The Best Tuna
