Nice Biscuit - SOS

Following the acclaim of their 2018 debut LP Digital Mountain and 2021 EPs Create Simulate and Passing Over, Nice Biscuit’s eagerly-awaited second album, SOS, is set for release on October 4th 2024 via Bad Vibrations / Fuzz Club in Europe and The Reverberation Appreciation Society / Greenway Records in North America. Written and recorded during 2022-23 at Swan Pond Studios (QLD) and mixed by Mildlife’s Jim Rindfleish, the nine-track album embodies the fuzzy groove-laden psych that Nice Biscuit is renowned for while introducing new danceable feels influenced by their love of disco, jazz fusion and world music.

With the beautifully hypnotic and soothing vocals of front women, Billie Star and Grace Cuell, SOS is about finding calm and balance in our chaotic world. While writing the album, the band often discussed the weight and compounding of the various crises of the world, thus each song is a different response to these turbulent times. The band explains; “Sometimes we feel hopeful and grateful, sometimes pessimistic and desolate, sometimes mournful and angry at the system, sometimes we feel that love can solve it all and sometimes we just become overwhelmed and apathetic about everything.”

SOS was written over one year as the band enjoyed multiple long weekends, out at Swan Pond Studios with their friend, Alistair Richardson (The Cairos, Clea). After road-testing a few of the new songs on tour in Europe in 2023, Nice Biscuit went back to Swan Pond Studios to record the album over a 6 month period. It is the final album with the band’s original guitarist and producer, Jess Ferronato, who recorded all the instruments on the record, while Richardson tracked all the vocals.

Unlike their debut album and EPs, for SOS the band decided to split up the recording sessions into two groups — bass, guitar, drums (the boys: Nick Cavendish, Jess Ferronato, Kurt Melvin) and vocals and percussion (the girls: Star and Cuell). The band explains their recording process; “The boys laid down the foundations of the songs on the weekend prior and then Billie and Grace would head out to add vocals and write lyrics. Often we would not have the lyrics or melodies finished before going out there, which allowed more focus and energy to be poured into the instrumentation and vocals. It fostered greater creativity and space by doing it separately and felt like a fun back and forth between the two groups, being excited to share what we have created. Then in the weeks after we got together and added more synth and percussion parts.”