“Emotion, spontaneity, feeling. No shit. Just get on there and do it.” Smokey Dave - Bo & The Sox

There’s polished. And then there’s Bo & the Sox.

The Luxembourg-based blues outfit joined Stephen “Steps” Lowe in the RTL Today Radio studio ahead of the release of their new album Opus 352, a record built around something increasingly rare: musicians in a room, playing together, trusting the moment and leaving some of the rough edges exactly where they belong.

Recorded live in Esch over the course of around a year, Opus 352 draws heavily on the Chicago blues that brought the band together in the first place, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Elmore James and Hound Dog Taylor among them.

RTL Today Radio also gave a first play to My Baby’s Coming Home, their tribute to that Hound Dog Taylor tradition.

For Bo, the band's beginnings stretch back around 15 years to Toulouse, where a shared obsession with blues brought him together with guitarist Smokey Dave.

“We have the same passions, we listen to the same music,” he explains. “It’s just the passion for this music that brought us together.”

That instinctive connection remains at the heart of the band. Slim Gio says that even after time apart, something happens almost immediately when they start playing again.

“The first strings, the first notes we play, and there’s directly a kind of atmosphere, connection, symbiosis. There’s a kind of magic in the air.”

Smokey Dave has a rather less complicated explanation for where the music comes from.

“It comes like this. I don’t know how it comes, but it comes.”

And perhaps that sums up Opus 352 rather nicely.

This isn't blues scrubbed clean in search of perfection. The band wanted the immediacy of musicians responding to one another, the feeling, mistakes, grit and spontaneity of live blues.

Or, as Dave puts it considerably more efficiently:

“Emotion, spontaneity, feeling. No shit. Just get on there and do it.”

Listen to the full conversation above as Bo & The Sox talk about Opus 352, their roots in Chicago blues, building an audience in Luxembourg and why sometimes the best thing a band can do is simply plug in and play.