The British indie-pop upstart offers tips on planning releases, deepening fan engagement and staying consistent.
Welcome to Sound Advice, the weekly interview series spotlighting artists’ creative process and their SoundCloud journey. We’ll get the inside knowledge straight from the source on how musicians, producers and creatives are leaning into the many facets of Next Pro to reach their audience and grow their careers.
“I’ve literally just gotten back from tour and got out of the shower,” says Alfie Jukes, hair wet, popping into the Zoom frame from his home in the British seaside town of Brighton. Alfie is full of energy, possibly because he hasn’t stopped moving since 2022, when millions of streams on his lush breakup song “Spiderwebs” catapulted him from recording Mitski and Lizzy McAlpine cover versions in a bathroom to headlining venues from Paris to Krakow. He followed this up with his debut ‘Little Omens’ EP in October 2023 and then a relentless series of live shows, supporting Only the Poets on 25 dates before embarking on his first European headline tour. Playing live and headlining festivals has always been a dream for Alfie, whose heartfelt and catchy indie pop is inspired by artists like Joesef, Phoebe Bridgers and Sam Fender. While crafting his latest ‘Sitting Pretty’ EP, he put in a lot of work to create sing-along moments, memorable hooks and transitions that will wow the crowd, who are already learning lyrics to his new songs from other fans’ social media videos. Even while recording, Alfie tended to his growing garden of fans, keeping his SoundCloud and social media busy with audio sneak peeks and behind the scenes footage that offers insight into the journey of a young artist grafting away. We picked Alfie’s brain about some milestones so far, from fan interaction to tapping into SoundCloud features such as replacing audio and private links to bring audiences closer.
Could you share some favorite moments from putting your new ‘Sitting Pretty’ EP together?
Some of the songs on this project were written over a year ago and it’s been a kind of slow burner, to be honest. Two of the tracks on the EP were from the first sessions I’ve ever had with specific writers. “Eyes Wide” was the one I wrote in my first session with an amazing writer called Mathias Wang and “Not Quite Gone” was the first song in my first session with Will Bloomfield. When I was making this project, I wanted all preconceived ideas out the window. I just wanted to play around and I didn’t have too much idea of how I wanted the songs to sound, and I think that’s why it worked. I describe it as a playful EP.
Did it feel like your other releases had more of a plan?
When I was writing the first EP, I had a very clear idea to make something really band-driven and live-sounding, and I wanted to go more down the indie path. That came to fruition with the first EP and the first tour. Once we’d done the debut project, we could kind of let loose a little bit and see what comes up – I don’t think we’d ever have come up with songs like “Not Quite Gone” and “Eyes Wide” on the first EP because they just don’t sit with where I was a year ago. The new EP doesn’t necessarily have one specific sound. I think when you listen to ‘Little Omens’ you're like, ‘Okay, these six songs are all in the same family.’ With ‘Sitting Pretty,’ they all fit together but they have their own personality; each song is kind of individual, but also very me. I was a little bit apprehensive about how the second project would go down because it was quite different from what I’d previously put out. It was nerve-wracking but also exciting and, luckily, people really loved it.
How do you use SoundCloud when you’re putting together releases?
I was using the private uploads a lot when putting this EP together because I like to hear the songs as a whole project. I was experimenting with what songs fit and feel best together, creating [private] playlists and listening to them as a whole, then rearranging things and re-listening. I find it really useful to be able to gauge the whole release.
Learn more about sharing private tracks on SoundCloud.
Do you use private links specifically for sending previews or demos to your fans?
Yeah! As a fan of music and a fan of getting more insight into how the music is created, I like the whole teasing element and I also like making fans feel like they’re a part of the journey and the release campaign. So, for instance, we’ll mass message my broadcast channel on Instagram or the people who are signed up to the mailing list and send them a private SoundCloud link to a sneak peek of the first verse of a song before anyone else has heard it. Maybe the link stays private forever or when the song officially comes out, we’ll replace that ‘sneak peek’ SoundCloud link with the full song. You gather engagement on that link from the fans you send it to and when you replace that audio, the engagement carries over to the full song, which is cool because you don’t lose listens or play numbers and you don’t lose comments. And I think it helps engagement in general when people can see that a lot of other people are already really loving a release. I think stuff like that is really exciting and doing that on SoundCloud is great because it makes people feel a part of the journey. That’s more important than ever now because there's less of a divide between artist and fan base.
Learn more about replacing a track’s audio on SoundCloud.
Has SoundCloud enabled you to learn more about who your fans are or communicate with specific collaborators or fans?
People being able to comment and interact with the music as well as just listening to it gives you an insight straight away because you can hear exactly what they think about it and see the timecode where people are commenting on specific moments. Being able to see who the top fans are is really cool. On the first leg of this tour, we could see who our top listener was on SoundCloud and we gave them guestlist tickets to the show in Utrecht. It was so cool to be able to message them and say ‘Hey, thank you so much for listening. Come and see the show and come listen to the music you’ve streamed so many times live.’ I think stuff like that is very specific to SoundCloud and it’s cool that it’s possible.
Learn more about using the Fans tool on SoundCloud with a Next Pro subscription.
You’ve done a lot of cool little things aimed at fans. Something that’s been really successful on TikTok is a series of videos of you singing cover songs in a bathroom. How did that start?
That was a lockdown thing. They always seem to be the videos that people like the most and I don’t really know why? Maybe it’s the acoustics, maybe it’s just a nice bathroom – gotta give mom and dad credit for that! Maybe people like the casual setup, the idea that the phone has been kind of propped up on the wall. It was always the plan to bring people in with the covers and the songs they knew, and then drop all my original music on them and hope they like it. And SoundCloud has been great because people have been asking for longer versions of the covers (those videos were a minute or so long) so SoundCloud is the perfect place for those full versions to go up. But yeah, we’re slowly switching the tone to “an artist who writes original songs,” with still a cover here and there to keep people happy.
One of the other things you’re doing on SoundCloud that’s interesting is short “behind the music”-style audio episodes where you share a bit about the making of your songs.
I love doing those. I mean, I’m a fan of that kind of “behind the scenes” thing. I listen to a podcast called ‘Tape Notes,’ which is all about how songs came about. So the idea of doing that on SoundCloud with my songs was perfect – I knew people would enjoy it and it’s only a few minutes long so it’s not a massive commitment for people to tune in. When I’m writing music, the ideas are very random, the demos all go on my phone and I’m always filming in the studio, so there’s so much evidence of the creation of the music and SoundCloud is the place for it to live. I think the ability to make more exclusive content for specific groups of people is what is really cool about SoundCloud. I think that makes it different from anything else.
In just a short time you’ve gone from playing open mics and smaller gigs around your town to playing sold-out shows in Europe and now you’re doing a UK headline tour. What were some of the moments that have felt like big milestones along the way?
I’ve always liked the idea of steady growth, going by step by step and making small gains. I’ve not tried to strive for the one viral moment; I think watching artists grind at it and slowly move up the rankings is really cool. Being on tour this week, a flashback came up in my phone from a year ago, when me and my guitarist Meg were playing little open mics in Brighton (where I live) to about five people in the corner of a pub. I was delusional, but in a positive way, and I used to tell Meg, ‘We’re not going to be doing this forever.’ And exactly a year later, we happen to be on tour in Europe playing in front of 1,000 people! Back in October, I played my first headline show in Birmingham, UK, at the Sunflower Lounge and I’d previously played a support gig there eight months prior. There’s been lots of overwhelming moments, to be fair. Being able to play a headline show at a venue that I’ve always loved in my hometown was awesome. This year, we’ve been invited to play the Great Escape festival in Brighton. It’s really full circle playing places I’ve always loved and been a fan of. Playing festivals has always been the dream, so playing Latitude and Kendal Calling this year is going to be my highlight I think. The live bit for me is like the cherry on top – writing all the music and engaging the fans all kind of meets at playing live.
What advice would you give to artists starting out in terms of staying motivated?
It sounds really obvious but when I very first started making videos and things, it was always about consistency. I was like ‘I’m going to make it my duty to make a video every day.’ And it didn’t work for so long. I lucked out and it ended up working, but it didn’t work for ages and I still stuck at it. It’s a cliché thing, but practice makes perfect. What was hard for me was that the cover song videos were doing so well, and the moment I started posting original songs, the numbers just went down. I think that was jarring and at first I was kind of taken aback. The first three original songs I released were all made in my bedroom and they weren’t received that well but it was stuff I really loved and wanted to put out. Being able to value what you’re making – irrelevant of how many people like it or comment on it or view it – is a hard thing to do but it’s essential. Consistency and really believing in yourself is so important. If you believe in it and you’re passionate about it, stick at it.
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