THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Following the acclaim of their 2018 debut LP Digital Mountain and 2021 EPs Create Simulate and Passing Over, Nice Biscuit’s second album SOS embodies the fuzzy groove-laden psych that the band are renowned for — while introducing new danceable feels influenced by their love of disco, jazz fusion and world music.
Graced by the beautifully hypnotic and soothing vocals of frontwomen Billie Star and Grace Cuell, SOS is about finding calm and balance in our chaotic world. While writing the album, the band often discussed the weight and compounding of the various crises of the world, thus each song is a different response to these turbulent times. The band explain: “Sometimes we feel hopeful and grateful, sometimes pessimistic and desolate, sometimes mournful and angry at the system, sometimes we feel that love can solve it all and sometimes we just become overwhelmed and apathetic about everything.”
SOS was written over one year as the band enjoyed multiple long weekends out at Swan Pond Studios with their friend Alistair Richardson (Cairos, Clea). After road-testing a few of the new songs on tour in Europe in 2023, Nice Biscuit went back to Swan Pond to record over a six-month period. It is their final album with guitarist and producer Jess Ferronato,.
Unlike their debut album and EPs, for SOS the band decided to split up the recording sessions into two groups — bass, guitar, drums (the boys: Nick Cavendish, Jess Ferronato, Kurt Melvin) and vocals and percussion (the girls: Star and Cuell). The band explain their recording process: “The boys laid down the foundations of the songs on the weekend prior and then Billie and Grace would head out to add vocals and write lyrics. Often we would not have the lyrics or melodies finished before going out there, which allowed more focus and energy to be poured into the instrumentation and vocals. It fostered greater creativity and space by doing it separately and felt like a fun back and forth between the two groups, being excited to share what we have created. Then in the weeks after we got together and added more synth and percussion parts.”
