Neu Black Honey: “All of the best bands take years before they’re something”

Black Honey may well be one of new music’s brightest hopes, but they aren’t shy about harping back to the good old days. There’s something special about this lot and their connection to the past.

“We’ve been playing together for years and years,” begins frontwoman Izzy B. Phillips, opening up on the Brighton band’s history. Collectively the four members have been working together – in and out of musical projects – for a long time, yet their new incarnation seemed to grow along with them. “I feel like all of that was experimenting and learning about what we wanted to do. Black Honey…” she trails off. “I don’t want to say it built itself but it sort of did. It all fell into place and everything felt right about it. Artistically, it felt like it a much more strong direction, and creatively, in terms of production and art direction. They’re all things that we’re really into. It was a long process of playing together and writing a lot of songs, and eventually Black Honey kinda formed itself from those experiments. We enjoyed it so just thought, let’s run with it. It’s still got its own sense of path, and we just let it do its own thing sometimes.”

Doing their own thing has been the name of the game all along: after all, people are still chatting about the band’s initial secrecy and their first real foray into social media, which saw them hand out a phone number for curious fans to WhatsApp message. “The WhatsApp thing was just because we wanted to do things a bit differently,” Phillips explains. “We didn’t just want to follow everyone else’s path.”

Without the pressures of an internet presence to keep constantly fed and satisfied, the band have been able to develop at their own pace. “I think all of the best bands take years before they’re something,” throws in bassist Tommy Taylor. “It’s probably why so many bands fail so early,” adds Phillips, “because they get all this excitement around them, and they don’t have any time to get their shit together. There’s so much overexposure, but we took that leap in regaining our own control as what we do and don’t expose ourselves as. That was empowering for us.”