The Big Ones: Our Girl find hope in the darkness | Dork
The Big Ones: Our Girl find hope in the darkness
After six years, Our Girl deliver hope and heart on their second record 'The Good Kind'.
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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.
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.
The band were faced with a dilemma: leave the songs as they are and live with it, or go back to square one, rework whatever unsettled them, and produce an album that they were wholeheartedly happy with. It might sound like an easy choice, but remember, this came five years into a six-year musical desert.
Fern and Soph are decade-long friends and share the honour of being one-half of guitar-rock queens The Big Moon, so there was nobody better to ask to take ideas and morph them into the warm, fuzzy tracks that eventually made it onto 'The Good Kind'. It's a decision that Soph doesn't regret making, and with good reason.
Outside of the studio, it was all the open-ended song ideas that brought the band back to its best, going back to basics to create the exact album that they hoped for.
The result is an album that feels like a warm hug on a rainy October day. The warm autumnal feeling that is immediately brought to life by the deep reds and vibrant oranges of the album cover continues right into the soul of the record. Soph's soft-yet-powerful vocal contrasts with jangling guitar on 'Sister', while muffled drumbeats at the start of 'Absences' imitate an Irish folk band in a dimly lit rural pub.
It's undoubtedly a change of pace from the heavier, more frantic sound of 'Stranger Today', but with enough thread woven between both albums to keep their Day Ones happy, most clearly in 'Something Exciting' and 'Who Do You Love', with multiple guitar lines creating a reverb-heavy sound that creates the softer edges that the band had hoped for.
As much as it was a process that proved much more difficult than anyone in Our Girl had anticipated, there's no doubt that it's a wholly necessary album for Soph, who makes no bones about the centrality of the band to her life.
This became even clearer for Soph over the last six years, most obviously with the pandemic, but also with the deteriorating health of someone vital to her life: "Before I started writing for this album, I felt like I couldn't write another record. I thought, 'Ok, that's a thing that's happened, but I've got nothing left'."
Unsurprisingly, a lot of these themes ended up coming from deep within Soph's psyche, dealing with teenage trauma that she hadn't realised she was still burdened with, both from a health perspective and around coming out as queer during her teens.
There's no doubt that Soph's coming to terms with her own sexuality and sense of self allowed her to delve deeper into topics, knowing she had the support of her friends and community in her native Brighton. Sometimes, though, it's impossible not to wonder what life might be like without that security blanket.
"I feel very lucky to have my little bubble, but I still feel other people's pain really strongly, so when I see people being down on themselves or not feeling accepted, I just want to tell them that they're great and really encourage them. I think it's super important to have role models – by accident, all my favourite artists are queer women like Big Thief and Courtney Barnett. I mean, now we have Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish, which is absolutely huge, but I still think extremely regularly about how far there is to go."
'The Good Kind' is an album that faces issues head-on and with a vulnerability and honesty that poignantly expresses the darkest times of Soph's life. But there is no point where the album becomes a dirge or falls into a rut of self-pity. Instead, the flowers that bloom out of these roots are beautiful examples of the importance of family, community, and most certainly, hope.
The album title itself is an ode to this idea that everything's ultimately going to be fine, even if things might seem unsteady for a while.
And that's where we find both Soph and Our Girl in 2024, as a worthy reminder that nothing worth doing comes easy. After an enforced hiatus, then a false start, it's inspiring to see Soph so content.
There's always the worry that a band is going to come back from a slightly-longer-than-normal break and have lost that sparkle that made them so exciting the first time around. Our Girl have not only retained that spark, they've polished it up, painted it gold, and multiplied it. Just don't leave it so long next time, ok?
Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. Our Girl's album 'The Good Kind' is out 8th November.
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