The big releases you need to hear from the week ahead.

After six years, Our Girl deliver hope and heart on their second record 'The Good Kind'.

Words: Ciaran Picker.
Photos: Jennifer McCord.

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone as truly grateful to be making music as Our Girl's Soph Nathan. With six years having passed since the Brighton trio's debut, 'Stranger Today', there was no guarantee that there was any more to come from them. Thankfully, they're now back, stronger than ever, bringing their intensely warm and calming second record, 'The Good Kind', to the masses.

There's a lot of superstition about the difficult second album and if it really exists. In Our Girl's case, it definitely did. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down life as we knew it just as the band finished touring their debut record, and when they did get into a studio, the time they had spent apart became evident.

"We'd rehearsed loads, we'd really planned out what we wanted to do in the studio," Soph recalls, "but we hadn't actually played live together for a while, and it just felt so disjointed. We're like a weird little family, and we just needed that time together to play out some ideas."

Our Girl, completed by Josh Tyler and Lauren Wilson, started out as a live band playing together long before they started playing original songs. As such, it's that synergy that is woven into the band's fabric and was even more important for this record, which was always meant to be a change of direction from their first LP.

"We wanted more space on this record," Soph states, "but I also love layering and thickly textured sounds, which I don't think we realised we needed until later. The songs that came out of the first record just sounded bare and dry musically and personality-wise; they didn't sound like us."