Cover Feature Take A Bite: Biig Piig

It’s this same quietly defiant energy that the 26-year-old is taking into the next phase of her career, as she prepares to unveil her first full-length collection. And after three EPs, a mixtape and a handful of standalone singles, to say her soon-to-be-announced debut album is long-anticipated is putting it mildly. “I didn’t ever want to put something out I wasn’t proud of so it’s taken a minute,” says Smyth, justifying the delay. “Also, a debut album always feels like quite a scary thing, you know? But I think I had to get to a point where I was just like, actually there doesn’t need to be all this pressure, it’s just the first album, not the last thing you create ever.

“Maturity-wise, too, I’m at a different stage in my life now, and I’m just a bit more present and secure in myself,” she continues. “I mean, there are definitely still sprinkles of chaos in my life, but on the whole I feel more grounded and settled, thanks to therapy and a few big life lessons.”

If Smyth had ever felt unmoored previously, it’s little wonder. Born in Ireland, hers was a pretty peripatetic upbringing, following her parents between Cork, the Costa Del Sol and West London as they pursued various jobs in hospitality. Without the luxury of laying down long-term roots, adaptability quickly became Smyth’s coping mechanism. Today, she views that quality as a mixed blessing. “I’ve always got itchy feet,” she reflects. “Even when I left home, I felt like I was moving around a lot in London. But also it’s been a nice thing to be able to do – especially growing up – because you get to experience different places and meet different people, and it gives you an open-minded outlook.”

Though always interested in music, Smyth’s introduction to songwriting came while studying Music Tech at Richmond College. There she connected with classmates Lava La Rue and Mac Wetha – her future collaborators in prolific arts collective NiNE8. Outside of college, she’d join them in cyphers [improvisational rap circles], before moving from freestyling to crafting her own material over Mac’s bedroom beats. Almost a decade later, Smyth still enjoys similarly off-the-cuff creative methods. “I’ve been working in proper studios with producers for the last three years now and I love the process of going in with nothing prepared, and then jamming for a while,” she says. “Just figuring out how you connect with the producer until you find your flow – it’s like having a conversation.”

For the album, Smyth has called on many of her long-term collaborators including Mac, Maverick Sabre and Zach Nahome (PinkPantheress, Loyle Carner), plus ‘Bubblegum’ co-writer Andrew Wells (Halsey, Ellie Goulding) who worked on forthcoming single ‘Decimal’. An unapologetic pop moment, spiritually the song picks up where ‘Watch Me’ left off, celebrating a steamy triste over the shimmy of distorted funk bass, cowbells and synth parps.

Smyth describes the track as “almost feral”, conveying what it feels like to be totally consumed by desire. “There’s nothing like the feeling of being able to switch off from the rest of the world and just be completely present,” she nods. “For me, that’s what the club environment is – it’s a place where time doesn’t really exist; a space that the outside world can’t touch. You disappear into it and come out exhausted, but with your soul replenished.”

Just as the song’s setting recalls Smyth’s formative experiences at raves and house parties, the verses zone in on another key facet of her creative DNA, finding Smyth whispering sweet nothings in her second language. “Lyrics in Spanish to me are always the most personal,” she explains. “I think because I was one of the first people in my family to be able to speak the language, it became a very personal thing to me and the place where I would express private thoughts or feelings. But my Irish and Spanish heritage have both helped shape me in a lot of ways. In Ireland, history is kept in poetry and stories and song. Even when history is wiped you can’t get rid of a song or a melody, which is why my Irish roots are so strongly tied to music.”

Recorded at Motorbass – the Parisian studio of the late Philippe Zdar, one half of iconic French duo Cassius – ‘Decimal’ seems to have captured some of the group’s playfulness by osmosis. Smyth agrees: “The environment definitely does influence [the music]. It’s a space that you walk into and you want to make music straight away. All the incredible records that they’ve made there – you can feel it in the walls.”

Meanwhile, the French connection doesn’t end there, as electro-house producer and sometime Ed Banger-remixer Surkin takes the reins on another album track. Smyth recalls their collaboration being a bit of a curveball. “It’s very soft – so different to the dance-heavy electronic world he resides in. I don’t think either of us thought we’d go into a session and make that.”

Softness is a quality that infuses many of the album’s genre-fluid productions, from gently rousing torch songs to quietly anthemic indie-pop. In the case of lead single and record opener ‘4AM’, the stripped-back verses are cocooned in the warm rumble of bass guitar, eventually ebbing away to reveal a shimmering chorus underpinned by four to the floor beats. As ever, Smyth’s diaphanous vocal lends an intoxicating intimacy to proceedings, as she delivers some of her most emotionally vulnerable lyrics to date.

“Oh, you could have hit me with the bad news first,” are the album’s first words. In the chorus she soothes, “I know you don’t want to be alone ‘cause no-one does,” the subject of the line left purposely ambiguous. “I think I’m addressing whoever needs to hear it, to be honest,” Smyth reflects. “Because I’m definitely addressing myself at a point in time, but I’m also saying that to anyone that’s felt like they’ve been in that place.

“I mean no one wants to be in a very dark place, do they?” she questions. “Because it’s something you can really lose yourself in. So it just felt like a bit of a mantra in the middle of the chorus – that idea of holding onto that thread and not losing it.”

Smyth always knew that ‘4AM’ would start the album. “It’s an important track to me,” she explains. “It feels like one of the most honest ones, because it’s an honesty that takes us to places that we don’t want to admit sometimes. I thought it was important for me to put that at the front, rather than hide it behind more upbeat tracks.”

Where ‘Bubblegum’ was billed as a snapshot of a very specific period of time, her debut examines scattered experiences from the past two years, be that specific moments or certain relationships. Smyth defines the album’s key themes as love and intimacy, loss and loneliness, departures and the hope for new beginnings, as she reckons with her standing in the world in her mid-twenties. While she won’t be drawn on the personal context behind the theme of loss, she concedes, “I’ve learned not to run away from things because it’s always going to catch up to you. There’s no easy fix, even when it feels like there is – it’ll come back on you 10 times harder. And you’ve got to just make sure that you’re as present in life as you can be.”

She smiles: “There’s a lot of reflection. But then that’s the whole reason I found music – it was a space for me to do that. So when it came to an album, I wanted to make sure that the songs felt like they were pulling you into the world. As a songwriter, that immersive quality has always been something that matters to me.”

Smyth’s world-building extends to the album’s visual offering, which will arrive with a one-minute video vignette for each track directed by Claryn Chong (Holly Humberstone, English Teacher). The films follow one of five interlinked characters – one of whom is played by Smyth – each representing an experience the album speaks on. As Smyth’s star continues to rise, so too do her budgets, and she’s relishing the opportunity to expand the horizons of this project, looking to artists like Doja Cat, Rosalía and Doechii for inspiration. If she hopes to ascend to their level of success, her timing could be perfect.

With the experimental, personality-led pop of Charli, Chappell and Billie currently dominating the discourse, Smyth seems set to launch her album into a particularly receptive climate. If audiences are looking for their next alt-pop hero, they could do a lot worse than Biig Piig on a project reportedly inspired by jungle, heavy techno and old school country music. Of course, Smyth’s hopes for the album are much less to do with commercial clout and more about enduring human connections. “I’d love audiences to not feel as alone with things,” she explains. “To be able to lose themselves and dance and have a good time, even through the sad bits.”

Dancing through her emotions is what Smyth is gearing up to do this November and December, as she opens for Aurora across the US. Having recently performed a private performance for Chopova Lowena’s London Fashion Week show, these will be her first proper live dates since the Gaza Aid benefit she organised at Shoreditch’s Village Underground back in January. Curated by Smyth herself, the line-up featured Kojaque, Lava La Rue, Maverick Sabre, Mac Wetha and Yunè Pinku, and raised over £11,000 for refugee charity Choose Love.

Where many artists are afraid to alienate fans by taking a position on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, it’s heartening that Smyth has no such qualms. “It’s my duty as an artist to speak about issues,” she explains. “And being an Irish artist, I feel very strongly when there’s fuckery going on.”

On a creative level, the power of collective action has always been integral to Smyth’s music, be that in her earliest solo experiments with Mac Wetha or the EPs she’s made with NiNE8 and her own bedroom-pop side-project Salmon Cat. “From the very beginning, the musicians I’ve met, the friends that I’ve made and the place that London is have all fed my creativity so much,” she says. “The rooms and the places that you end up kind of being surrounded by, and the music you end up listening to inspires everything you make.”

In this sense, the ordinary becomes extraordinary – another recurrent idea on Biig Piig’s imminent debut. Looking back on her journey to this point, Smyth is hugely proud. “I’ve learned so much. Even things I would do differently in the future, I don’t regret doing this time because I’m just so happy the album’s written itself the way that it has,” she smiles. “In doing it, I’ve learned that music is still something that will always help me out of spots and make life amazing and better.”

Biig Piig’s debut album ‘11:11’ is out on 7th February 2025.

Tags: Cover Features, Features, Interviews, Biig Piig, October 2024