BIG SPECIAL Draws A Line In The Sand As A New Era Begins…
BIG SPECIAL have released their new EP, O’JOY!, via SO Recordings/Civilians. The ten-track collection arrives following the singles ONLY FREE WHEN SLEEPING, PLAINTIVE NATIVE, SLUGLIFE, and DRAGGED UP A HILL (and thrown down the other side), completing a project the Black Country duo have described as “the fallen parts” of their first two records – reworked, reshaped and given a life of their own.
Comprised of vocalist Joe Hicklin and drummer Callum Moloney, BIG SPECIAL have spent the last few years building a reputation as one of the UK’s most vital new bands; channeling working-class frustration, dark humour, tenderness and fury into songs that feel both deeply personal and painfully communal. O’JOY! continues that trajectory while pushing further into the shadows, gathering together songs that didn’t previously fit within the emotional architecture of their albums but still demanded their own space. Both Joe and Callum talk to Rob Lyon about the EP.
Are you stoked with the new EP? Were you surprised with being able to kind of go back to some of the stuff that you had originally that didn’t quite fit either of your albums and revisit that?
Joe: Yeah, it was nice, man. You put a lot of time and effort into them and stuff, we didn’t want them to go to the wayside. When we are writing full proper albums, we like it to be in the moment, so we thought it’d be nice to just clear the cupboards basically and go back to all the stuff we didn’t get to use that we wanted to give a home to, just like re-contextualize it in the studio, took it all back in, rerecorded some stuff, things like that. It was really nice to be able to give strays a home.
Callum: It’s weird thinking like some of them songs we spent weeks on years ago, and then you just move on to the next one that you get excited about and it falls behind and you forget about it. It feels like a good full circle thing coming back to them, and then they all finally made their mark.
Even at the time, did you think that they were too good to leave off an album and that you would have to revisit them?
Joe: We think that with everything we do, .
Callum: It’s hard making albums though, because you’re so limited. Albums don’t get the same sort of thing that Christopher Nolan has where he can just make a three‑hour film and people will watch the whole thing. You got to make it consumable in some sense, you know? The first two albums we did, we had a good twenty‑odd tunes for that. We had to really fight to whittle down to the final numbers. When you’re making an album, it’s more about the bigger picture of this one piece. So yeah, these ones didn’t, it’s not even that they got forgotten, it’s just that in the broader picture of each album that we did, they didn’t quite fit the narrative that we were running.
When we came back to do this one, it became really obvious putting them all together that they had their own narrative running throughout them and just a small bit of re‑contextualizing by putting them in a certain flow, it still had that same effect really. It’s got a new system for us. We’re not used to doing it that way. We normally write to spec instead of making a bit of a jigsaw puzzle with it.
Is there plenty more sort of in the cupboard there that you could go back and do the same sort of thing? Or have you definitely put a line under it?
Joe: No, that’s it. We’ve got like a couple of demo wee bits we never fleshed out and little experimental bits and stuff, but as far as songs go, that’s all of them. I think there’s one song that we left in the dirt, never to see the light of day. Other than that, who’s that, Super Mega?
Callum: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Joe: Yeah, because that was the point for us. Some of those songs were doing the same job as others already on the albums, so like Carl says, there was no point padding things out. But they still meant something about the time and place we were in, and that isn’t really what we look for in an album. So we knew creatively we weren’t going back to that pot of songs again. Getting them out of the way and putting an EP out just relieved us of that temptation, you know what I mean? To not do it the way we like to do it. They’re from that time, and now they’re out there.
Callum: Hell of a lot less, like, you don’t feel guilty that you’re sitting on anything now. It’s scary in one sense, because we haven’t got any more songs left, so that’s a bit daunting. But equally, we’re not hiding anything anymore. There’s nothing left in the cupboard. Everything we’ve ever written is now out there, pretty much.
Joe: Uh‑huh.
Callum: It’s a bit of a release, like a positive thing in a way. Feels good.
Does that take a bit of pressure off when you start thinking about the next album or whether it’s another EP, that you can literally start with a clean slate?
Joe: Yeah, both, I think. Because there’s pressure in the sense, like Carl says, that we’ve got empty pockets now and we’ve got to head back into the wilderness and actually write some new stuff. But at the same time, there’s no pressure to use anything we’ve already done for the next big thing, you know what I mean? We’re not in that position anymore where we’re thinking, “Oh, but we’ve got this song we like,” and then that stops us from getting on with writing new material. So it’s a bit of a middle ground. There’s pressure, but it’s a healthy pressure.
Callum: Yeah. So there’s nothing to hide behind in a way now. No previous work to hide behind. It’s more about, right, let’s crack on with the next one.
Joe: Let’s get working.
When you said you re‑contextualised, did that mean the songs changed quite a bit from what they were when they came out of the cupboard to how they finished?
Joe: Not a lot. It was more just a detail thing, we didn’t want it to feel like a bunch of demo‑style odds and sods. We wanted it to have its own narrative feel. So it was more about adding the right touches so those songs sit together in an album‑type flow, where they make sense when you listen through in a row, and it doesn’t suddenly jump into some mad swingy dynamics from songs we made at completely different times.
Callum: Re‑contextualising was more about how we felt about the songs as well. We wrote some of them years and years ago when we were in a completely different place in our lives, career‑wise, work‑wise, relationship‑wise, everything. Our whole lives have been turned on their heads in the last two years of being professional musicians. So songs we wrote back then about one thing now sound like they’re about something completely different. If we wrote them today with the same lyrics and the same context, they’d carry a completely different meaning.
So yeah, it’s odd, not just sonically, but meaning‑wise. Hotel wasn’t written on the road, even though it’s the last song on the EP. It wasn’t written while living out of hotels, but if we wrote it this week, people would assume that’s exactly what it’s about. That shift in context has made us realise how the meaning of songs sits on ever‑shifting sand. Things always change, your perspective, how you look at something, and the context keeps developing and turning into something different.
Does that change the whole studio experience for you as well, given that it was a slightly different way you went about it this time?
Joe: We’ve made everything in our friend’s attic, and this time we only had one day in a studio to do some drums. Nearly everything we’ve ever done has come out of that same attic. So it didn’t feel like a big shift, more like punctuating what we’d already been doing, you know what I mean? We were so busy touring from the first album right through to now that the second album was basically bombing back into the attic whenever we could and getting it finished. And this one was the same, squeezing a bit of time in December to go in, polish things up, and get it done.
So it was all very practical, timing‑wise. It felt like: right, we’ve got to get that in, do that, then move on to this, and so on. A lot of mental prepping. But the process itself was very similar. I think that’s what we want to change for the next thing, mix it up a bit and do it in a different way for us.
Callum: It feels like this EP really underlines the end of the first big era of our band. We spent three years touring, and we’d been writing since 2020, and now everything from that whole period is finally out in the world. It feels like a line in the sand, the start of the second phase for us. Now we can move forward. We’ve got a slightly quieter summer coming up, and we’ve been turning things down so we can have more time to get back in the studio, write slowly again, and take the touring element out of the equation.
The first album, we were juggling normal jobs just to get into the studio. The second album was all about change and how our lives had become chaotic with touring, so it made sense to write in between shows. But now it’s time to go back and do some proper searching in the studio for a while, take our time with things, no half measures. We want to really enjoy the creative process, because touring’s amazing, but we’ve done it for three years straight. It’s time to get back into the really creative side of it again.
Joe: Yeah, take our time and enjoy it, man. It’s about enjoying it and doing things in different ways so it stays fun for us. We’re always going to make the best music when we’re enjoying that time and trying out new things. It’s very easy, once you get somewhere with it, to commit to a method, “Okay, this method got us here, we’ll just do that forever.” But that feels boring to us and counterproductive. That’s not how we made the first stuff that got us where we are. That came from experimenting, trying new things, putting ourselves out there.
So that’s what we want to keep doing, finding different ways to approach it and it’s exciting. When we go and jam a little demo, we’re buzzing about it. Just the demo, the walk back, having a smoke, it still feels like being in that band that hasn’t quite made it yet. We’re still just trying to make good music that excites us.
Interview By Rob Lyon
O’JOY is out now and streaming everywhere via SO Recordings/Civilians.
