Sunrise Academy builds a sound big enough to transcend their Texas roots

Eleven years ago, at a tiny Orthodox Christian summer camp in the middle of rural Texas, two teenagers found each other over a pair of guitars. Julian Sol Jordan was 13. Yakob Dye was 14. There was no stage, no studio, no plan — just chords traded in the heat and beats hammered out on their phones like secret messages. Neither of them knew that the friendship they struck up between camp bunks would one day rack up over 200,000 monthly listeners across streaming platforms and a fanbase who swear they can hear the whole thing humming beneath the music.

“You can hear the friendship behind y’all’s songs,” one listener told them. It’s the kind of compliment you can’t force, and it’s exactly what makes Sunrise Academy worth paying attention to.

Two kids, two cities, one sound

For years, the pair kept the connection alive across the miles between Dallas and College Station, driving back and forth to see each other, to write, to keep the flame from going out. What emerged is a partnership with clearly defined lanes. Yakob is the multi-instrumentalist, the one who fits the puzzle pieces together and coaxes a full arrangement out of thin air. Julian is the video wizard with a sixth sense for melody — the guy who finds the line you can’t stop singing in the shower.

Their process is charmingly backward and completely their own. A drumbeat comes first. Then a wash of nostalgic guitar. Then a mumbled melody, half-invented on the spot, that slowly hardens into words. The songs arrive like memories — fuzzy at the edges, then suddenly sharp.

You can trace some of that sunshine straight to Julian’s mom, Jessica Marie Jordan, a member of the Polyphonic Spree. Growing up backstage, surrounded by robes and horns and unapologetic optimism, left a mark.

Recorded on a table, somewhere in East Dallas

Here’s the part that should embarrass major-label producers everywhere: Sunrise Academy makes its music at home. Not in a converted garage with soundproofing and a signal chain worth more than a car — in the living room. The kitchen. The entire operation consists of a microphone, a laptop running Ableton and a table.

It wasn’t always even this polished, either. To record their first song released on streaming, titled “Maybe,” the duo tracked vocals in Julian’s closet with a sock stretched over the microphone. They didn’t know how to quantize, so they manually tapped the spacebar to line up the drumbeat, one press at a time, like nervous surgeons. The results were rough. The results were also, somehow, exactly right.

That DIY intimacy isn’t a limitation for them, though. That’s the point. There’s a closeness in these recordings, a sense that you’ve been let into a room where two friends are figuring something out in real time. And the arrangements stay lean on purpose.

“One chord’s enough,” Yakob and Julian say in unison. “Two chords, you’re pushing it. Three chords, you’re playing jazz.”

It’s a joke, but it’s also a whole philosophy. When you strip a song down to its bones, there’s nowhere to hide, and every melody has to earn its keep, every lyric has to mean it. They add a horn here, a hi-hat there, purely on instinct, and never a note more than the song asks for.

Dallas as the LA of Texas

Some bands treat their hometown like a launchpad to somewhere better. Sunrise Academy treats Dallas like a co-writer. Dye calls it “the LA of Texas,” and the city shows up all over their work. East Dallas is the beating heart of it — Keller’s Hamburgers, Lakewood, the wide gray shimmer of White Rock Lake. Those places are backdrops for their music videos, sure, but they also serve as the emotional geography the songs are drawn from. This is music made by people who love where they’re from and aren’t shy about showing it.

Both of them stretch beyond the band, too. Julian directs and edits films. Yakob works on a solo R&B project. But Sunrise Academy is where the two currents meet.

‘Stranger Woman,’ and a field trip you shouldn’t skip

The momentum is real. On June 26, the duo released “Stranger Woman” as a single from an upcoming album, which is being unveiled as a waterfall release, with more tracks to be released as the album’s July release date draws closer. Sonically, it’s all harmony and haze with West Coast warmth, reimagined through a Texas lens. Consider it the appetizer. 

The main course arrives later this month: a full album called “Don’t Miss the Field Trip.” The title winks at the band’s own name, and the record trades in memory and feeling. The track titled “2005” lives entirely inside nostalgia, chasing the ache of bottling up a moment before it slips away. The yet-to-be-released “Permanent Pen” is a hymn to sentimentality, to the desire for keeping every small feeling somewhere it can never be lost. “Outta Town Kids” carries a bittersweet edge about growing up and drifting apart.

And then there’s “Brother for Life,” the emotional anchor of the album. It was originally written six years ago by their friend Wolfgang Hunter of the Dallas alternative rock band Fishing in Japan, and the duo reshaped it to fit their own story — the college years, the rough days, the brotherhood that carried them through. It’s a song about showing up for each other, sung by two people who have been doing exactly that since they were teens.

If the music feels tender, blame Jordan. His bandmate warmly does. Jordan cried when a landlord cut down the tree in their front yard. In another band, that might be a punchline. In this one, it’s the whole engine. That soft heart is why the songs land where they do.