Cover Feature Nova Twins: Angels and Demons

While most people would use their time back at home to readjust, catch up on sleep and reacquaint themselves with their quote-unquote normal lives, instead, the band found themselves with a contractual deadline for Album Three, so work had to begin again. “We definitely did feel very disorientated coming off tour,” Georgia nods. “But we had to write the album, we had to keep the ball rolling, so I think that was definitely a [period of] big growth in terms of how much we can deal with.”

Admitting to us earlier this year that their third album felt closer to the stereotypical struggles of a second album (“We were like, ‘we don’t know ourselves, we haven’t lived, we just lived in a van’,” Amy explained back then), work for what would become ‘Parasites & Butterflies’ took place mostly in the winter of 2023 and was, at times, an altogether darker experience. Faced with a tight turnaround and a sense of disconnect, their inner demons began to rear their heads. “I think when your mental state is so low,” Georgia says, hinting towards some of the record’s themes of anxiety, self-loathing and mental health struggles, “[it’s about] really finding ways to build yourself back up in new ways and rediscover yourself.”

As such, their third is - thematically, at least - a more complicated beast that what’s come before. Born in the mire of these darker times, it has, in turn, allowed them to showcase the multifaceted strength and resilience that they’ve become so renowned for, without skirting over the more vulnerable moments of their inner selves.

“It was a natural progression,” notes Amy, of this balancing act. “We wrote ‘Supernova’ in a time where we had to be super strong,” she says, pointing to its birth during the pandemic and the superhero-esque avatars they wrote for themselves. “There was so much going on, and we wanted to give people hope in a time where it felt hopeless, and so we gave that part of ourselves, but things take a toll. We’re all human, we all go back to our homes at night and, you know, face reality, and we just felt it was super important to be a bit honest with things. We don’t always have to be super strong because that’s not logical. No one’s fine all the time, and if you are, you’re lying,” she laughs. “We just wanted to make sure that there was a full perspective of our human experience, you know?”

“Through this record we’ve become more vulnerable,” nods her bandmate in agreement. “We’re not afraid to say that we are vulnerable because we’re human, [that] it’s OK if you feel sad and vulnerable one day - it doesn’t make you weak.” “It’s about accepting yourself entirely,” Amy adds. “The good and the bad, you know?”

“It wasn’t all dark, it was light too, and that’s why we wanted to show both sides,” Amy picks up. “It was dark at first and we were like, ‘oh, this sounds a little bit depressing’ and that was fine, but we felt like there was fun to be had to represent our full spectrum. So we were like, ‘OK, let’s now have some fun, let’s have a night out’, and suddenly, that side started to come back into the album and then there was a good balance. When we found balance, the album found balance.”

It was at this point that the underlying theme of the record began to finally show itself: “When we had enough songs to properly have a full listen through, we started to see the themes of beauty and chaos,” Georgia explains. “It was very opposite in light and dark because I think we were feeling like that.” A quick glance at the album’s track listing is all the proof you need, with titles like ‘Glory’ and ‘Hummingbird’ nestled alongside the likes of ‘Monsters’, ‘Piranha’, and ‘Hurricane’. “When we were thinking of the album title, we were thinking we needed something that represented that chaos and beauty,” she continues. “One of the lyrics [on ‘Sandman’] was about parasites and butterflies and we knew it was perfect. It [encapsulates] that balance: you have to understand chaos to appreciate beauty.”

This yin and yang concept wasn’t isolated to the album alone: rather, it raised its head a few more times during the recording itself. Having spent several months perfecting demos with hundreds of stem files, the duo soon decamped to a decidedly different environment to their darkened basement on the UK’s South Coast: the great expanses of Brattleboro, Vermont. “Suddenly we were presented with all this space and all this distance and land,” Amy says of the change of scenery when they arrived in the US to work with producer Rich Costey. “Sometimes it just puts things in perspective, to get away and not really be on our phone loads, and to just focus on the art and what we love doing.”

Even the story of their first meeting with the producer - who’s worked with musical titans like Muse, My Chemical Romance, The Killers and Rage Against The Machine, to name a few - feels prophetic. “We were quite nervous to go because we hadn’t met Rich,” she explains further. “We’d only met him once on Zoom, so we were like, ‘oh my god, we’re gonna go out in the middle of Vermont…’” “In the middle of the woods, where there’s bears,” chips in Georgia, before Amy picks back up: “We’d never met this producer before, and you sometimes hear horror stories about producers who can be quite intense, so we were thinking, ‘God, please let him just be normal and nice’, so we go out there and then the first time we met was at an eclipse party. It was like a dream.”

After such a prolonged period of uncertainty and doubt, it was while watching a solar eclipse that everything finally clicked into place for the duo. “It was crazy,” says Georgia, “the lighting was just weird and eerie.” “It covered the land, didn’t it? The darkness covered the land,” Amy explains, still a twinkle of wonder audible in her voice. “It was astonishing to be honest. We were just in awe, and we took it as a good omen for the album, like ‘everything’s gonna be all right’.”

Speaking to us almost a year on, the campaign for ‘Parasites & Butterflies’ is firmly under way. Having launched the album’s lead single ‘Monsters’ back in January, they’ve already performed at this year’s MOBOs and appeared on the telly via a slot on The Jonathan Ross Show last month. With their schedule of commitments already stretching well into the latter part of 2025, we can’t help but wonder how the band are approaching things this time around, after recovering from such an intense few years.

“Touring is a crazy thing because you do get these adrenaline dumps,” Georgia responds. “It’s a weird life to live, especially when you’re doing it for a month or two months in a stint. You really have to learn how to ground yourself and find ways to make your mind nourished and happy. I think we learned that along the way through trial and error on the last tour. Now, going forward, we’ve got things in place that ground us more easily - [for example], we’ll write our diary entries every night just to centre us.”

“Now, doing the things that we’re doing, we’re like, ‘let’s enjoy the moment, let’s just enjoy it’,” Amy enthuses. “We started off the year doing the MOBOs and, if that was us in the ‘Supernova’ campaign, we would have been anxious for weeks about it, like, ‘oh my god, we’ve got this coming up, we need to be…’. But this time [we were] as cool as a cucumber,” she grins, “like ‘no, let’s enjoy it’ because these moments are fleeting. You get three minutes! Three minutes of euphoria and then it’s done, so enjoy it.”

‘Parasites & Butterflies’ is out 29th August via Marshall. 

Tags: Cover Features, Features, From The Magazine, May 2025, Nova Twins