BIG SPECIAL aren’t ones for waiting around. Less than a year on from the release of their debut album, ‘Postindustrial Hometown Blues’ – a furious, poetic howl from the heart of the Black Country – Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney are already back with the follow-up. No singles. No teaser campaign. No breath taken. Just the drop of ‘National Average’, fully formed, emotionally raw, and about as subtle as a brick through a billboard.
“I’m stressed as fuck,” Joe says, speaking days before the release. “Crunch time with dropping this album. But we are getting there now, and I’ve just paid my rent, made a pasta salad and rolled a big fat one.”
Their decision to sidestep the traditional album rollout wasn’t some grand anti-industry statement; it just made sense. “We didn’t want to roll straight into another campaign and bore everyone,” Joe explains. “So we thought it would be nice to drop an album to be judged as such. Then we can start mixing up our set lists.” They’ve always been more interested in creative momentum than marketing plans. “We’ve always been a little Beyoncé-coded, so thought we’d drop an album like she did,” he grins. “We also naturally move on pretty quick creatively, so we didn’t want songs and albums to fall by the wayside as we go. For us to stick to where we are at in the moment. So make hay whilst the sun shines, and get the music we are making out.”
Unsurprisingly, few people saw it coming. “Not a lot have asked because I don’t think anyone was expecting us to do another album so quickly – especially because we’ve been so busy gigging and our personal lives falling to bits.” Joe admits the secrecy wasn’t exactly airtight, though. “It’s only been a very loose secret to friends, and amongst people, we know in the slightest or when we are flirting with the cool kids. And I’ve been scheming, dropping egg-related hints all year on social media, just for my own sense of satisfaction.”
‘National Average’ didn’t arrive fully formed; it emerged naturally in scattered jam sessions and sleep-deprived conversations when the band weren’t on the road or picking up the pieces of their lives. “We wanted to stay creative and not just be travelling salesmen going around playing the same songs over and over again,” Joe says. “We had a couple of songs we demoed right after album one to work from, so we just spent some time on them. That grew into a bunch of jam sessions with Mike in his attic in Devon.”
From there, it became a record about change and the complicated feeling of finally escaping the grind you assumed you’d be stuck in forever. “The album quickly grew into another thought-out narrative about us moving away from our normal lives and the perspective that gave us on ourselves and others,” Joe explains. “We are always changing and growing, and growth is pain. Making music has always been our way to reckon with pain.”
That reckoning feels more direct this time around. Where their debut was a release of everything they’d built up inside for years, the follow-up came with more self-awareness and confidence. “When making the first album we were also figuring out our sound and how we were on stage, and building it all from the bottom up, as well as getting used to our lives completely flipping on their heads,” Joe says. “This time, we had a little more confidence and perspective on ourselves, which helped us just get in a room and make songs out of whatever we were playing.”
“I’ve been scheming, dropping egg-related hints”
Lyrics arrived fast and raw, scribbled and sculpted right there in the studio. “I’d work on a lot of my lyrics in the studio this time, which I haven’t done before. But because we were buzzing off working at such a fast pace and I’d done the prep, it all started falling out, and we got stuff done much quicker than we thought. We didn’t have the typical second album worries – we were happy to crack on and know we can still do this side of things.”
There was no master plan, no vision board. “We don’t like to make big lists of what we want to make or achieve,” Joe says. “The fun of making music for us is being spontaneous and locking in, so we tend to work from a chosen limitation instead.” That limitation? Stripping things back. “On this album, we just decided we were going to make less tracks for the songs, to be more sparing and purposeful. Fill the space with more considered elements. When we were improvising with one synth, one bass or guitar and the drums, we knew what we were playing would be the backbone of each song.”
The results are leaner, nastier and more defiant, but also more reflective. “As the songs came together we started to realise we were coming at it with a bit more confidence and a bit more of a strut and a snarky scowl.”
That snarl masks some deep emotional turmoil. “Honestly, the whole process was [tough],” Joe admits. “We did it in several week-long chunks we found between touring. And our whole lives were changing. My personal life was looking completely different to what it was before we started, and I had a lot to reckon with in myself and how I affect those around me, and, in turn, my opinion of myself and my place. Anxieties are not deleted, but replaced. A lot of mental health things stay with people regardless of their situation – like a stone in a river. The water is always moving and changing, but you, the stone, still remain always fucking wet.”
That sense of emotional chaos is laced with humour throughout the record, but it’s a very specific kind of humour: sharp, dark and rooted in a place where asking for help is rarely an option. “It’s just the style and attitude of what we are doing at the time,” Joe explains. “It’s how I speak and think abstracted with rhythm, rhyme and metaphor, so it depends on the song. It’s natural to a lot of people where we are from to deal with pain through humour. People can’t really get away with requesting care and attention, so have to express through having a laugh about it or use a veil of humour.”
Online, too, he sees this everywhere – an entire generation processing collapse with LOLs. “We just can’t deal with being completely serious all the time. Everything is looking so bad and hopeless, so we can at least have a laugh at how random and chaotic life is. Because it ain’t fun, but it is funny.”
“There’s so much awful stuff happening in the world”
That same tension fuels the album’s more satirical moments, particularly when it comes to the music industry. On ‘God Save The Pony’, Joe rages about being “barely past minimum wage” and a “rock’n’roll cliché” while ‘Shop Music’ skewers the business of art with lyrics like “exposure doesn’t pay and you can’t eat art”.
“All business is always going to get a bit businessy,” Joe says. “Art and the art industry have always existed at odds with one another, as do artists and capitalising on their art. There’s also so much awful stuff happening in the world, like the Israeli-led genocide in Palestine, which makes this experience a constant reflection on our place and purpose.”
He’s clear that BIG SPECIAL aren’t trying to stay neutral: they’re using their platform to say something. “We try to speak up and do what we can to use the resources we’ve gained to give some away.” That’s only possible because they’ve got a team that respects the work. “We have a great team that respects us as artists and jumped on us at an early stage. There’s an emotional investment there and we are never pressured to go along with anything we aren’t comfortable doing whilst representing ourselves and our work. Being on a label and keeping them overheads low have allowed us, in our personal experience with this, to make a living doing our thing – which is a privilege that most never get. But the road is long, and we have come close to the edge of burnout a couple times already, so we welcome a fucking lie down when it comes around.”
That ability to keep going, through burnout and doubt, is down to the friendship at the heart of the band. “It’s one of the few things that has stayed the same,” Joe says. “We have always been comfortable together; creating together has always been easy; being friends has always been easy. We’ve definitely been brought closer by the extremely unique and narrow experience we now share. But this is, was, and hopefully always will be, getting together with my closest friend to make music and have a laugh.”
Even now, with two albums out and a growing cult following, their goals haven’t changed. “Success is making a living from doing what you want to do,” Joe says. “I just want to keep making the albums we want to make and putting them out and going about playing gigs off the back of them. I want us to always be good at what we do and make thoughtful and considered work. But mostly, just don’t ever want to go back to work.”
That sense of purpose bleeds into every track. It’s impossible to separate the personal from the political when the world is on fire. “I can’t really write anything that isn’t in the circle of context around the place in time it comes from,” Joe says. “Protest, art and performance are being treated as worse than the mass murder and starvation of innocent civilians… You can’t be someone without being somewhere, so I always try to keep that in what we are making.”
Asked what the best possible reaction to ‘National Average’ would be, Joe doesn’t flinch. “That they get where we are coming from,” he says. “And that it’s the best thing ever, and we deserve much happiness and many accolades.”
He laughs. But you get the feeling he means it.
BIG SPECIAL’s album ‘National Average’ is out now.
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