Optimistic. Friendship. Hustle.
These are the words that came to mind when asked to describe the musical duo Sunrise Academy. The band’s origin story is important to members Yakob Dye and Julian Sol Jordan, who are both in their mid-20s. They don’t want to be another unknown artist behind catchy singles on your Spotify playlist.
They want to tell the story of their friendship.
Photography by Lauren Allen
On paper, the two young men’s backgrounds are pretty different. Jordan grew up east of White Rock Lake and attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Dye spent his early years on the other side of the world in Ethiopia until he was adopted at age 4 and moved to College Station.
“Imagine being in an orphanage with nobody and then coming to a family with 10 people,” he says.
Dye describes his adopted family as musically gifted. They all played a role in the church band — Dye on guitar and drums — and his brother taught him to make and master music.
As a teenager with a guitar in tow, Dye met Jordan about a decade ago while playing basketball at a Christian Orthodox summer camp in a middle-of-nowhere part of Texas. Their connection was effortless, the kind that can only happen with kids. It wasn’t long until they started making music together at camp.
They kept in contact through email after camp and, eventually, made the drive for visits. Dye’s interest in music only grew, and he and Jordan would send beats to each other to listen to. About a year ago, Dye moved to Oak Cliff after he finished college.
Now that they are a bit older, it’s not lost on them how special their bond is.
“These last couple years of our 20s are like, this is the time where friendships tend to either keep going or stop,” Jordan says.
The positivity in their friendship is what they try to capture in their music. Sunrise Academy (originally named Sol and Dye, but they changed it to the current moniker, inspired by a rural daycare called Sunshine Academy) provides easy, breezy music. Think Harry Styles’ 2022 Harry’s House album. Some songs have vaguely romantic lyrics but also portray a romantic view of life.
Sunrise Academy’s 2021 single “Wondering Why” set this vibe of endless summer, where the only thing on your mind is a pretty girl.
“‘Wondering Why,’ I remember when we made that; we were, like, 18 years old, 19 years old, and he came over one summer to stay at my place three hours away,” Dye says. “We were just drinking slushies, eating pizza, playing pool, riding bikes.”
Jordan adds, “The stuff we make, we’re trying to go back and evoke that feeling because it’s just innocence, childhood, but not in a way that’s cute or whatever. That’s what I feel like is — I’m not going to lie — missing in a lot of people’s art, is just that semblance of hope.”
In Dye and Jordan’s creative process, instrumentation is prioritized over lyrics. The words in their songs create a vibe more than a message. For Dye in particular, he’s inspired by The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” a masterclass in simple yet effective songwriting.
“We’ll just start with a melody, something that we really like, usually a beat that sounds nostalgic or sounds like kids or very summery,” Dye says. “When we start writing, we just try to keep it simple. I wouldn’t even say our lyrics are very happy in a sense, like a lot of our lyrics are melancholy, bittersweet, ‘take me back to some old times.’”
And if writing music starts to feel forced or not so much fun, they stop.
“I feel like that’s when you start to do bad work,” Jordan says. “Also, when you start to do work that you have the intention of other people in mind when you’re making it, that’s also when you typically make your worst work, when you’re like, ‘Oh, these people might like this.’ It’s just got to feel real.”
Sunrise Academy is a “DIY” band. Jordan and Dye put their music together basically on their own — composition, songwriting, both singing on the tracks, most of the production and directing their own music videos — while each of them holds down full-time jobs. They don’t always record in a professional studio, so sounds may not be as clear as they can be. But they like it like that.
“For the longest time, we used a mic that was like 100 bucks for all of our songs,” Jordan says. “His computer crashes on us all the time. It’s this dinky little computer, but if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”
After Sunrise Academy started releasing music regularly, Dye came to a crossroads. He had the choice to further his education in occupational therapy school or take a chance on the band.
“I was like, ‘Dude, what are we going to do with this band?’ We love the music. We don’t really market or anything for it. What are we going to do? Are we going to be the people who, when we turn 40 and 50, say, ‘Hey, we had a band in high school, too, or in college, too,’” he says.
Dye was teed up to start occupational therapy school a few years ago, and he went on a trip to Europe a month beforehand. Upon arriving back, he had a revelation.
“I was like, ‘No, I can always go back to school,’” Dye says. “‘I can’t always do this.’”
Around that time, Dye and Jordan started marketing Sunrise Academy on social media, particularly TikTok, by telling the story of their serendipitous summer camp meeting.
“We were posting every single day,” Jordan says. “I think we were posting three, four times a day, just our story. It would get to the point where I’d be doing a shift at this restaurant, be tired, take my gloves off, post a video, put it in my pocket, go serve someone food, come back, look — a million views just within 10 minutes, and it was like, ‘Oh my.’ We get messages every day that just describe how much this stuff means to people.”
As of writing this, Sunrise Academy has 86,260 monthly listeners on Spotify. Their most popular TikTok post is of the duo singing their single “Dinner Date” with 3.7 million views. But despite their desire to be known, Jordan and Dye are not aiming for Beyoncé’s level of fame.
“I’d be lying if I said we wanted to be super famous and going around on tour,” Dye says. “I get paid to have fun with my best friend. That’s the way I think of it. And so we know the numbers are all kind of a product of just us having fun and doing that.”
Last year, Sunrise Academy released the eight-track album Big & Strong, named as such to represent their growth and that of their band. And they want to continue that growth by playing live shows and meeting their fans.
The duo posted a fake band breakup announcement on April Fool’s Day that ended with Dye hyping up a new song and album coming out this year.
They’re more energized than ever.
“(This year) is like, we have the ammo ready,” Jordan says. “We have the listeners, record, merch, promo, it’s just time to act.”
