Our Girl: “Even if a song starts off pretty bleak, it’s always hopeful at the end”

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

Words: Ciaran Picker.
Photos: Jennifer McCord.

This article is currently only available to Dork supporters. Sign up to read now here. If you’re already a member and are still seeing the paywall message, log in to Steady here.

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.”

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.

“That first recording session was a real knock emotionally. When you put all your eggs in one basket, and it doesn’t work, it’s really tough. We didn’t know if we knew how to fix it. I was oscillating between ‘it’s probably fine as it is’ and ‘there’s no point doing this if it’s not what we want’. It was only when Fern [Ford] listened to the songs and said ‘yeah, we can definitely work with this’ that we decided to give it another go.”

“When you put all your eggs in one basket, and it doesn’t work, it’s really tough”

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.

“We started tentatively changing small things but ended up taking the stems apart and trying completely new things. Josh and Lauren brought ideas that I would never have thought of; it was just so freeing. I’ve never felt that way in a studio before.”

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.

“My favourite part of making the album was when we were demoing on my bedroom floor,” Soph smiles warmly. “Lauren would record her backing vocals on my bed, and Josh and I would just sit and play guitar on loop for hours, slightly changing an idea until something amazing fell out. The nights where we played until late, just having a good time without any pressure or planning, they were just the best time.”

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.

“We really needed that texture for it to sound like us. We realised after the first recording that it doesn’t suit our sound for the songs to be really sparse, and by then, we had a really strong idea of what we wanted. We wanted it to sound really warm and bring out that love and comfort that the songs reference but also to provide that contrast between heavy lyrics and softer sounds.”

“All my favourite artists are queer women”

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.

“I’m so grateful to have both The Big Moon and Our Girl because they serve different purposes. I would definitely feel like I was missing something if I didn’t have both because Jules [Jackson] mostly writes the songs in The Big Moon, and I write them in Our Girl; I need to write so that I can get all those feelings out and be the person that the people around me need me to be.”

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’.”

“I definitely spent time during Covid reflecting. There was a lot of uncertainty about the world, and I wasn’t working for the first time in six years, so a lot of stuff that had been building up that I hadn’t thought about for years came to the surface.”

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.

“I wrote ‘Relief’ about coming out and my experiences as a queer woman, basically responding to other people in that position and telling them what I would’ve wanted to hear. ‘Absences’, which is the quickest song I’ve ever written, is about a seizure I had when I was seventeen. I was terrified of it happening again, and I guess I was just carrying so much fear around about all that stuff that I’d been through.”

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.”

“I get really strong nostalgia from smells”

‘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.

“It wasn’t until I listened back to the record fully that I noticed hope as a real thread through the record,” Soph ponders. “It goes back to the sonic choices – it’s all about finding that warmth and comfort in experiences. Even if a song starts off pretty bleak, it’s always hopeful at the end.”

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.

“I get really strong nostalgia from smells and sounds,” Soph reveals, “so if I smell something that reminds me of my childhood, I get this really intense wave of nostalgia, which can be a good or a bad thing. In this context, though, I guess I’m saying it’s the good kind of memory – it’s a joy in that intense nostalgic feeling that says ‘everything’s going to be ok in the end’.”

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.

“It’s always weird putting singles out,” she posits, “because it’s impossible to tell what people actually think of them. But we played some shows in the spring, and they just felt like a relief. Before the pandemic, I think I was just on the conveyor belt a little bit; I’d forgotten the magic of playing and making music with my friends and people I love. Now I’ve rediscovered that joy, and I just want to have more experiences like that.”

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.