Emotional Oranges

For years, nobody knew who they were. Emotional Oranges performed in headgear, shrouded in fog, refusing to show their faces on social media, cover art, or anywhere else. The Los Angeles R&B duo known only as A and V built a devoted following on voice and production alone, releasing six years' worth of mixtapes and completing four world tours before ever putting out a proper album.

The origin story sounds invented. A, an audio engineer who had worked with Drake, and V, a vocal coach whose credits included Adele, met at a bat mitzvah in 2017. Their first writing session produced "Unless You're Drowning" in roughly thirty minutes. A debut single, "Motion," landed on SoundCloud in May 2018 and eventually became the theme song for RuPaul's Drag Race. That track and its follow-up, "Personal," generated over twelve million streams and established the duo's sound: warm, groove-driven R&B that pulls from 1990s influences while staying unmistakably modern.

Their Juice mixtape series arrived in rapid succession. The Juice: Vol. I dropped in May 2019, Vol. II followed that November, and The Juicebox came in June 2021 with an expanded guest list that included Vince Staples, Channel Tres, Becky G, and Kiana Lede. The Juice: Vol. III arrived in 2022, and STILL EMO in August 2023 brought collaborations with ZHU and Tkay Maidza. In January 2024, they released Blended, a joint EP with Nigerian singer-songwriter Nonso Amadi that fused their signature sound with Afropop.

Touring kept pace. The 2019 Chill Baby Chill Tour sold out all eight dates. A Very Emotional Tour that fall brought them to Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and across Europe. By 2022 they had played Coachella both weekends, appeared at Pharrell's Something in the Water festival, and headlined dates in South Africa, South Korea, and Australia.

In May 2025, Emotional Oranges released Orenjii, their actual debut studio album. The title means "orange" in both Korean and Japanese, a nod to time spent writing in Seoul and Tokyo. The record features Jessie Reyez, Becky G, and NCT's Jaehyun among others. A co-founded the duo's label, Avant Garden Records, which released the project independently. After years of building in disguise, Orenjii is the first project they have called an album rather than a mixtape.