Meet Chetuno & Leah

Chetuno and Leah, riding the same groove. Our original AI-assisted collage, based on our own photographs.

By Chetuno & Leah, founders of Bubbling Box

When we founded Bubbling Box, we heard music. Not for the first time. For the most important time in our lives.

We had recently married, welcomed our beautiful baby girl—the youngest in our family—and found ourselves building a new chapter while the pandemic made the world feel smaller by the day. There were questions we couldn’t quite put into words and emotions that didn’t care how carefully we tried to explain them.

Then a song would come on. Our bodies seemed to understand what our mouths couldn’t manage.

Bare feet, backyard stars and one more song

We filled our home with recorded live performances. In the backyard, we played concert videos on a projector screen, took our shoes off and looked up at the stars. We listened. We danced. We let ourselves be completely taken by what was coming out of those speakers.

“Just one more song” became a wonderfully unreliable promise.

This wasn’t background music. It became part of our family’s culture: something we shared, something we looked forward to, something that helped us feel alive when so much around us felt uncertain. A great performance could turn an ordinary evening into a little event of its own. No velvet rope required.

And, inevitably, we got curious. Who was making us feel like this? Where had that voice come from? What was the artist trying to say? We followed one performance into another, learned their stories and paid attention to the choices behind the sounds, the visuals and the worlds they were building.

The more we learned, the more we wanted other people to hear it too.

Meet the two people behind the Box

We’re Chetuno and Leah: a married couple, creative partners and enthusiastic repeat offenders when it comes to playing a track again immediately after it ends.

Chetuno is the passionate writer in the family—the one trying to find the words for what just happened to our ears. Leah has a designer’s instinct and a style-savvy eye: fashion, texture, color and those wonderfully peculiar details that make something feel like somebody, rather than everybody.

But those aren’t separate departments with a wall between them. Leah helps choose the music, develops stories, writes, edits and shapes our direction. We share the Bubbling Box voice, and the stories she shapes and approves as her own belong under her name. This is something we make together.

Our backgrounds mix country living, Los Angeles experiences and the kind of varied upbringing that leaves you interested in more than one sound, one style or one way of seeing the world. We bring our quirks with us. Musically, we’re usually reaching for the volume at exactly the same moment.

Why we write about it

We wanted to give the music we loved another voice: the voice of people who actually live with it. People who dance to it, return to it and want to understand the person who made it.

A release is more than a product arriving on a schedule. Behind it are decisions, doubts, imagination, craft and a human being hoping somebody feels something. We care about that part. We want to ask thoughtful questions, listen closely and report accurately without squeezing the life out of the experience.

Our enthusiasm is personal. The facts still have to hold up. When we’re reviewing something, we’ll tell you what it makes us feel. When we’re reporting, we’ll make clear what is known, where it comes from and what still needs an answer.

What you’ll find here

Expect music discoveries that interrupt whatever else you were doing, full reviews of projects we want to spend time with, conversations with artists and live experiences worth leaving the house for. Our Release Radar pieces offer a quicker introduction when you want something fresh to put in your ears.

You’ll also find art, fashion and stories about the world our artists and readers inhabit. Creativity doesn’t stop at the edge of an album cover, and neither does our curiosity. Sometimes we’ll be dancing. Sometimes we’ll be asking uncomfortable questions. Both belong in a publication made by people who care.

We want independent artists to gain momentum, and we want readers to leave with something: a new favorite, a better understanding, a reason to go to a show or an idea that stays with them.

Independent, with both feet on the dance floor

Our commitment is to keep Bubbling Box independent: no corporate sponsorships steering the coverage, no advertising trackers as the price of reading, and no selling away the honest voice that brought us here.

We depend on the support of artists and readers. Reading a story, sharing it, sending a friend toward an artist’s work or supporting the publication helps this little corner grow. When artists share our coverage with their communities, that connection works both ways: more people discover Bubbling Box, and we can introduce more people to the next artist who deserves to be heard.

At its heart, this is still the two of us, listening closely and nudging each other when something extraordinary comes on.

If you’ve ever heard five seconds of a song and felt your whole evening change, you already understand why we’re here.

Welcome to Bubbling Box. Kick your shoes off. We’ve got something for your ears.

—Chetuno & Leah

Have a discovery, a story or something you think we should hear? Say hello to Chetuno and Leah.