The Army, The Navy: The Music
An afternoon in Transmitter Park with the duo turning inside jokes into an album.
This is what it looks like when best friends lock in…
On a sunny June afternoon, we met up and found some shade in Transmitter Park. Maia and Sasha have been singing together since day one of college. Not much has changed since then, they just have a name now: The Army, The Navy. A powerhouse duo with a cult following. Here’s our conversation:
So tell me about the new project — who you guys are, where the name came from, how you met, all that.
MAIA: We’re The Army, The Navy. We grew up in the same hometown, Marin County, right outside San Francisco, we had the same voice coach, Amber Morris — she’s the reason we knew each other, and why we were trained the exact same way. Amber was also the one who told us to look at Loyola University in New Orleans. We roomed together there and never stopped living together — we were music students, so a lot of our homework was literally “write a song,” and we’d just do it together. That’s the origin story of how we bloomed into a band.
SASHA: The name is completely random. We had a list of names we liked and picked one — nobody else really loved it except one friend we thought was really cool, and we thought she understood the vibe, so we went with it.
MAIA: I’m still not totally sure what the meaning behind The Army, The Navy is — it’s just two forces joining as one to make powerful music.
When you’re explaining the project to someone who’s never heard your music — what’s the elevator pitch?
SASHA: Heavy, rich — songs that are really dense, lyrically and melodically, and production-wise too. Dark. Misty. Intense.
MAIA: Kind of like a rolling cloud of fog, honestly — there’s a certain depth to it.
Who were your musical influences growing up — who did you bond over?
MAIA: Growing up we had pretty different tastes. I had Maroon 5, Katy Perry, The Beatles — my dad loves The Beatles — and Bruce Springsteen.
SASHA: I had Cat Stevens — my parents listened to a lot of Cat Stevens — David Gray, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys. I also feel like once you get to music school, everybody starts geeking out over the craziest chords and the most “indie” stuff of all time, and that’s kind of what we were geeking out over. Snarky Puppy, Tank and the Bangas.
MAIA: I remember the very first day of college, Sasha and I were in the dorm together, and we watched some kind of festival set — this is my new friend, and this is college.
Are you touring?
SASHA: Yes — we’re opening for Lord Huron in a few weeks, at the end of July. Then we’re playing Lollapalooza, which is super exciting. Our headline tour for the album is in the fall, and we’ll be playing Warsaw, in Brooklyn.
What was your first show like, together?
SASHA: We had a bunch of shows before we were The Army, The Navy — it was just the two of us singing together. We played this little venue in New Orleans, a coffee shop that hosted local artists at night — we didn’t have original songs yet, it was all covers vibes. We were 18.
What’s surprised you about the album cycle?
SASHA: We’re doing press for the first time, so this is all really new.
MAIA: Learning how to be interviewed — we were just talking about how, when someone puts what you say in quotes, you can’t adjust it after the fact. Whatever you say is what’s going in the article.
MAIA: Recording an album — a big piece of work — was also new and challenging, working with a lot of live instrumentalists rather than just one person behind a computer. It was new for us to work with people who are so good at guitar, so good at drums, who have their own niche on their instrument, and to let them creatively express our music in a way we trust, while still giving guidance. I learned a lot about communicating with musicians who aren’t singers.
SASHA: We play guitar as well, but singing and songwriting are really our thing.
What’s the album about?
SASHA: The record is about how putting your art into the world can be a really scary thing. When Maia and I first started this, we did it purely out of love for the craft — we never really thought about the fact that it was going to be critiqued and listened to by people, that people can take your art and make it their own once it exists outside of you.
MAIA: Writing music together is what created our friendship and our bond in the first place — it’s very sacred to us. I didn’t have that relationship with anyone else in my life. So there was also this element of, okay, we’re sharing this with the world now, it’s not just our special thing anymore. I had to find our own intimacy within the music even while sharing it — to keep nourishing our own connection to it, even though it’s public. That’s pretty much what the album’s about. It’s vulnerable — we write about things that directly happen to us, so it’s like a little diary entry in the world.
Do you remember when something clicked — when you knew this was going to be the project, that you’d be The Army, The Navy?
SASHA: I don’t really have a specific memory of deciding to be The Army, The Navy — it felt so natural. People already saw us as a duo. Whenever someone asked one of us to sing on a song or do a harmony at a show, we’d always show up together. So much so that senior year, when each senior got assigned a freshman buddy, Maia and I just got given one buddy, together — that’s how much we were seen as a pair.
MAIA: It’s special that our school, since it was a smaller, creative-based program, let us do that — let us write songs together when we were technically supposed to be writing one song per person. That’s not really what you typically hear, but it shows how creative-based our school was, and it really helped us.
What do you each admire in the other?
MAIA: Sasha is the most driven person I’ve ever known — really good at the business side, very tech-savvy, she’s the one posting, making the TikToks, she just has great taste. She also comes up with melodies I would never even imagine — even though we were vocally trained the exact same way, what’s in her head is influenced by so many things, and it’s pushed my voice in directions it’s never gone before. I think it adds a real uniqueness to our sound as a band.
SASHA: Maia leads with kindness wherever she goes, and that’s taught me a lot. She’s also gotten so much better at everything — guitar, singing, writing — and watching someone grow like that is really cool.
Anything else you want to plug?
MAIA: We have a show October 28th at Warsaw. Also — our Discord is popping.
SASHA: We’re always in the Discord, it’s super fun — a great way for us to connect with people who love the music. People post their own creative work in there, and we post our own stuff too, since a lot of our listeners like to send music back to us. If you’re going to a show alone, people will post asking if anyone wants to meet up beforehand — so many people have found real friends for life through it.
MAIA: It’s such an unexpected thing about being an artist, creating a community like that. Our community is so beautiful, so welcoming and safe, and I’m just so proud of the people — I feel blessed to have such good people listening. Honestly, that’s what I’m most proud of.
Developed and scanned in partnership with Nice Film Club
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