BIG SPECIAL on adjusting to life in the spotlight and staying true to themselves for surprise second album 'NATIONAL AVERAGE.' • Interview • DIY Magazine

When they stormed onto everyone’s radar last year with their blistering debut statement, ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’, BIG SPECIAL seemed to embody something of a national mood, their music - a testament to being overworked, underpaid, fucked off and yet still up for a laugh - resonating deeply with now-fans across the country. In the short time since, Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney have found that, somehow, both everything and nothing has changed.

It’s this push and pull which lies at their centre of their just-dropped, surprise second album ‘NATIONAL AVERAGE.’, a record which sees the pair double down on their signature brand of potent punk-poetry whilst also venturing into funk-flecked and stripped-back new terrain. Here, they amp up both the satirical bite (‘SHOP MUSIC.’; ‘GOD SAVE THE PONY.’) and the earnest heart (‘JUDAS SONG.’; ‘THIN HORSES.’) of their debut, marrying the political with the intensely personal to finesse their marriage of the two - of heaviness and light, punch and poetry - to an even finer degree.

Strikingly astute, ‘NATIONAL AVERAGE”s 13 tracks are replete with gallows humour and eviscerating aphorisms (“We use ‘fucks’ for commas / To make everything sad sound fucking funny”, goes ‘PROFESSIONALS.’; “If a tree falls and it’s not on Twitter / Does it even make a sound?” Joe asks on ‘GET BACK SAFE.’), but they also delve into the complex, confusing experience of navigating a lifestyle change that, for some time, BIG SPECIAL accepted might well be a pipe dream.

An unflinchingly honest, unmistakably human project that truly speak to these times, ‘NATIONAL AVERAGE’ is, well, far from mediocre. To mark the album’s arrival, we caught up with Callum to chat more about its unique rollout, their instinctive recording process, and the enduring head-fuckery of the industry.

You’ve just released your second album, ‘NATIONAL AVERAGE.’ - congrats! This one has been far from your usual album campaign though; was there a particular reason you opted to drop the record as a surprise? Was there any part of you which was nervous or worried about how this move would play out?
Thanks very much. There were quite a few reasons we wanted to surprise drop this album. Mainly, because we’d just spent the last four years writing, recording and then releasing our debut record, which is a long time to focus on one thing for two scatty people like us. During that album build up, it made sense to do a classic campaign plan of dropping a bunch of singles, because we were fresh out of the box and nobody knew us yet. We had to build up a whole fanbase first, and it really worked to help get us off the ground and moving.

The other side of that approach, though, is that you have to slice and dice the bigger view of the album into bite-sized chunks. We try to write our albums as one large, cohesive piece of work, so this time around we wanted it to be consumed that way. Not starters. No side dish. The buffet is open.

It’s been very nerve wracking waiting to see what people think of it, and feeling like everyone has forgotten about us… but hopefully it’s paying off.

As part of this guerrilla promo strategy, you projected images of the album’s artwork - a plate of egg and chips - onto famous London landmarks; it was even splashed over Buckingham Palace! Can you tell us a bit more about how this reflects or embodies the record?
Ha, yeah that was a laugh. Again, because we weren’t taking a ‘normal’ approach to this album release, we wanted to start it off with a bang. We went with a few locations and different images to give a general feel for what the album embodies: reflections of normal life set against societal pillars of class, gentrification and masculinity. This is all shit you recognise. We also projected a “national average” length ruler onto a handful of London’s most phallic shaped buildings…

And on top of all that… Joe’s dad cooked that egg and chips, and the idea of his fine culinary work being on display on the side of the Tate Modern was too much to pass up.

In fact, based on the intro to the ‘GOD SAVE A PONY.’ video, picking London - instead of a different city, or somewhere ‘regional’ - was also a way of re-iterating some of the album’s themes…
Yeah, exactly that. We are all becoming London, slowly but surely. The identities of most cities up and down the UK are seeping away, being replaced by the capital’s standard. You’re not investing in other cities; you’re just swallowing them. Within that change comes the commodification of regional individuality. It felt appropriate to project our album - which kicks back against that trend - directly in the belly of the beast.

It’s only been a little over a year since the arrival of ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’ - how have you found the experience of writing and recording ‘NATIONAL AVERAGE.’ amidst touring, festivals, and all the instability or fluctuation that comes with being on the road?
It’s been completely different, to be honest. We spent so long working on that first album, and in that period we went from trying to fit studio sessions around full-time work, to trying to fit studio sessions around full time touring… It’s been exhausting, but like I mentioned, when we came off tour in December ‘24 we were hungry to get creating something brand new again.

We went for two weeks initially to test the waters, which quickly became two and a half months, and by the time March rolled around and touring season kicked off again, we had finished it. Joe had been collecting lyrics along the road for a while, but while we were down there it all came together so quickly and naturally. We couldn’t really believe it ourselves…

“We’re quickly learning that you can have your cake and eat it too, but you’ll still suffer from indigestion.”

— Callum Moloney

It feels like an incredibly honest, incredibly immediate album - one that you’ve said looks at “stages of reflection on an average life as it moves further away”. Is this loss of “an average life” something you feel you’ve experienced since releasing ‘POSTINDUSTIRAL HOMETOWN BLUES’? If so, how have you navigated this loss?
It’s definitely been strangely isolating. Enjoyable and crazy validating, but very isolating. Our experience has become so narrow in a lot of ways: van, airport, venue, hotel, repeat; missing people’s birthdays, weddings, and funerals because you’re away on tour. [It’s been] literally watching the passing of normal life from the sidelines.

The people who get it most are other musicians and artists, but you never actually see any of them all that much, because they’re off on their own journeys around the world. Equally, it makes you look and feel like a bellend for complaining whilst “living the dream” to your family and friends, who you’ve spent 30 plus years dragging down to gigs and begging to listen to releases…

Obviously, we’re over the moon to not be working our old jobs any more, and to be focusing on something we have control over and care about so deeply, which 99.99% of people don’t get to do… But yeah, I dunno. We’re still getting used to it, and quickly learning that you can have your cake and eat it too, but you’ll still suffer from indigestion.

Can you tell us a bit more about how the album came together; was there a particular track which ‘unlocked’ ‘NATIONAL AVERAGE.’ for you, or helped solidify what its throughline would be?
It was born out of a series of improvised jams. It’s our favourite way of writing music - no boundaries or rules, just set up all the microphones in a room and get behind some instruments. We record everything that spills out, and then go back over it and start to cut up little riffs and samples. Sometimes a 30 minute jam will only give us a three second sample, but we stay open to everything we find.

From that, we build up structures for a fuller song and add lyrics, which Joe usually works on simultaneously, patching together stuff he’s written on the road, or stuff that fell straight out of his dome. In the end we probably wrote about 25 songs for this album, but boiled it right down to the 13 we’ve released. The final song to be written was ‘GOD SAVE THE PONY.’, and it felt like the final track [we’d been] missing; lyrically and contextually, it solidified the full track list for us.

The album’s closer, ‘THIN HORSES.’, contains your first ever feature, Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. Why did you choose to introduce another voice at this point? For you, how does Rachel’s presence on the track change its mood or message?
We love Rach to pieces. We’ve known her for years now, and she’s been a massive support through the changes of this band and our lives. When we wrote ‘THIN HORSES.’, we realised early on that it was going to be our album closer, and the emotional climax of the album. It’s probably among the softest and most earnest songs we’ve ever written. It felt natural to bring in a second voice to give more weight to each lyric as the song builds, and we wanted it to be one that would match the fragile vulnerability of the song. Obviously, that couldn’t be more bang on Rach’s wheelhouse - we asked, and she was well up for it.

What are you most looking forward to about ‘NATIONAL AVERAGE.’ being out in the world? Is there a song you think will particularly resonate with people? Or something about the album you think fans will be surprised by?
We’re excited to see what people respond to most, to be honest! With this approach of a blind drop, we really have no clue what to expect. There’s a few very different sonic directions on this album for us - such as ‘JUDAS SONG.’ Or ‘THE BEAST.’ - which will be interesting to see if the fans like. We just hope it resonates with people who loved our first album, as well as new fans, and that people carry on this mad journey with us.

‘NATIONAL AVERAGE.’ is out now via SO Recordings.

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