Latest news with #Omeara
The Guardian
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nova Twins on silencing the heavy metal doubters: ‘People don't question men'
Nova Twins vocalist-guitarist Amy Love is trying to make me feel better about the litany of things that have gone wrong during our one-hour chat. She and her bandmate Georgia South entered the shabby-chic dressing room of London's Omeara in a whirlwind of denim, arraying themselves on the mismatched armchairs after a soundcheck that didn't entirely go to plan – my Dictaphone broke, South's battling a cold, I realised I had the wrong notebook with me … We're all feeling a little frazzled as trains rumble by and South boils the kettle for a Lemsip. The fact chaos swirls around Nova Twins is fitting, perhaps. Their brand of boot-stomping rock takes the pop and R&B music they'd grown up with and distorts it to hell. Nu-metal adjacent, they play a kind of grimy rap-rock with the energy and hooks of the pop end of punk. Their first album as Nova Twins, Who Are the Girls?, was released in 2020 and with lockdown denying them a traditional touring and promo cycle, they threw themselves into writing its follow-up. Supernova (2022) was a rush of brash, powerful adrenaline that catapulted them into the rock music primetime. They garnered famous fans – Elton John said 'These girls rock my world', Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello told NME they are one of his favourite bands; huge stadium support slots with Bring Me the Horizon and Muse; a Mercury prize nomination and two solid years of touring the world with a stage show that has all the energy of a can of Monster after five minutes in an industrial paint shaker. Suddenly they were famous, successful and contractually obliged to write another record in a tight time frame having spent two years doing nothing but sitting in a van. While they were away from home, friendships and relationships were hard to maintain. 'Eventually … the texts stop coming,' Love says sadly. 'It does take a mental toll – and you don't realise [at the time, on tour] because you're excited and then you're like: 'Why are we crying suddenly for no reason?' It really throws you off balance. And when you come home, you're a robot. You feel hollow.' The Twins – not actual twins, but rather old, perfectly matched friends (what did they do on those long van rides? 'Honestly we just yapped the whole time') first met in their teens, when Love dated South's brother: she became part of the family – the two girls even shared a bedroom – and eventually they started making music together. An early iteration of the group was named BRAAT way before the lime-green album was even a twinkle in Charli xcx's eye, and their first song tumbled out of them amid giggles on the sofa. 'Bad Bitches' – 'It was just bass and vocals,' South recalls, 'and we were like, oooh this is cool …' But this time, nothing was tumbling out of anywhere. Slowly, as they decompressed from the tour and started engaging with 'real life' again, reconnecting with friends and spending time enjoying London, themes and ideas started coming up. Third album Parasites & Butterflies is alive with that feeling of separate existences: it pings from serpentine hellfire (Glory) to kick-you-in-the-face rawk (Monster) to Beastie Boys-esque chanting (N.O.V.A.) and potent balladry (Hummingbird). On Supernova, they felt they had to be basically superheroes, relentless with manic positivity and power; the album has a hint of dread. 'There's a kind of dark undertone – which is reflective of where we were at the time – but in a good way,' Love says. 'It's open. Honest. Because we're not all happy and super-strong 100% of the time.' The Twins made a conscious decision not to use any synths on the album – all the sounds are made using guitars (Love) and bass (South) with vast boards of effects pedals to manipulate their output. 'We've always pushed ourselves to do things really manually live,' South says. 'And I think being women in music … people don't question men. So they can have everything on the track and they can still be 'the greatest' – people won't question if they're playing live, they won't question if they wrote their riffs, or if they're miming, or anything. Because we were women going into it – and Black women – we were like: we need to play everything, do everything.' It might have started as a reaction to the misogynoir that dogs heavy rock genres but it turned out to be an integral part of a Nova Twins show, with South in particular marshalling two vast planks of pedals at her feet, stomping on them periodically to take her bass from a muscular strut to a thundering dubstep fuzz. Growing up in Essex and south London respectively, Love and South dealt with varying degrees of racism (Love is of Iranian and Nigerian descent, and South is of Jamaican and Australian). When they were playing endless toilet venues and open mic nights around the capital, they soon felt like outsiders in the notoriously white, male world of heavy music. 'We couldn't really see where we fit in,' Love says. 'We're like the only women on the bill, definitely the only Black people on the bill, or were at the time when we first started. And it would be like, well, we don't quite belong here but the audience are really receptive to us. And then we'd be like, we didn't really fit in the R&B hip-hop world, either.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion In 2021, they campaigned for the Mobos to add an alternative music genre to acknowledge the influence of Black rock'n'roll pioneers such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard. The committee listened and in 2022 added the best alternative music act award (the Nova Twins were nominated) and at this year's show they took to the stage with a blistering performance of Monsters that felt pointedly like a victory lap. Where communities don't exist for the Nova Twins, they are not afraid to stride in and demand space. As well as the Mobo campaign, they recently launched a scholarship for music education at London's ICMP (Institute of Contemporary Music Performance) – and get Love on the topic, she will speak passionately for hours about making room for rock in the mainstream. 'There's a huge audience [for rock] and so much love for it but for some reason, some gatekeepers feel like: 'Oh, that can't be on daytime TV,' like it's a swear word or something? Like, who said? And why? Instead, they'd rather put something they found on TikTok than a band that's spent like 10 fucking years honing their craft and musicianship on stage.' Waiting out there in Omeara is a crowd of diehard fans that is impossible to categorise – old headbangers, mani-pedi office workers, kawaii rockers; it runs the gamut. The show (part of the Brits Week War Child gigs) is a blistering hour of music from a band who are fighting for more for everyone. 'OK,' Love says, putting her hands out flat in front of her. 'If that doesn't exist, let's create it.' Parasites & Butterflies is released on 29 August on Marshall Records.
Telegraph
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Gracie Abrams: Gen Z's ‘relatable' pop star delivers a one-note performance
When American singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams announced that the support act for her Secret of Us arena tour would be a bedroom pop artist called Dora Jar, her fans started a petition to replace Jar, complaining that her 'slow-paced' songs would not 'get the crowd excited'. But Abrams herself is a purveyor of plaintive ballads: songs which have enjoyed chart success – That's So True has just spent eight weeks at No 1 in the UK – and which had no trouble exciting the O2 Arena crowd. The Jar incident frames Abrams' fans as demi-Swifties – Taylor Swift's overzealous army of fans – and indeed, the 25-year-old was a support act on Swift's Eras tour, works with Swift producer Aaron Dessner, and released a debut album, Good Riddance, indebted to Swift's album Folklore. She can sound so much like a wannabe Swift that you wonder why she hasn't been wrestled to the ground by a legal team. Thursday's crowd was mainstream pop crowd business as usual: the occasional startled dad amid a sea of young girls wearing bows in their hair, plenty more parents waiting outside in the O2 atrium as if waiting in the playground at the end of the school day. Abrams played her part with aplomb, radiating relatable girl-next-door energy and declaring that every single person in the audience was her best friend. She stretched her two albums out over almost two hours: strummed romantic anguish with TikTok-friendly hooks. At times her performance felt calculated, a focus-grouped pop star: from party-line patter to the way she ran off stage barefoot, clutching her guitar. Abrams, who is rumoured to be dating actor Paul Mescal, is the daughter of filmmaker JJ Abrams. But being a 'nepo baby' only gets you so far, and she clearly has whatever's required to sustain an audience. She's grown that audience organically – her first show in London was four years ago at the tiny 320-capacity venue Omeara – and is a capable live performer who doesn't rely on backing tracks, even on vocally demanding songs like Tough Love, its verses hurtling like the freight train thoughts of a lovesick teen. She seemed entirely at home in front of the O2's enormous crowd – sometimes literally. Towards the end of the night, she left the basic main stage (four-piece band, raised platform, intermittent dry ice) for a B-stage decked out to resemble the bedroom where she wrote and performed songs on Zoom during the pandemic. A camera recreated the homemade angle for the arena's big screens as Abrams played her 2020 lockdown hit I Miss You, I'm Sorry. It was a neat piece of stage design, the online fans transformed into a real-life throng. But it wasn't enough to shake up the evening. Abrams' songs don't vary much in pace, and if you were one of the few not screaming along to every word, the show began to plod. Even a new song, Death Wish, inspired by a friend who was dating a 'mega narcissist', offered more of the same. You wanted the band to have more of a presence: when they did, the results were fantastic. They freed I Miss You, I'm Sorry from its bedroom pop confines, supplied Free Now (from her 2024 album The Secret of Us) with deserved angsty oomph — and sent the middle eight of her best song, That's So True (still lingering at No 1) to roof-busting heights. Abrams may have brought her bedroom with her, but she fares better when she leaves the muted bedroom pop at home.
Telegraph
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Rachel Chinouriri: No wonder Adele wants to champion this brilliant young talent
The tears arrived over halfway into the show, when Rachel Chinouriri introduced a song she wrote as a teenager at the Brit School, unconvinced she'd ever make it. But the 26-year-old British singer-songwriter wasn't crying about the unrequited childhood crush commemorated in its lyrics. The song – an early hit called So My Darling – has taken on a whole new level of emotion after Chinouriri was nominated for Best New Artist and Artist of the Year at this year's Brit Awards. She's finally getting her flowers, quite literally: after the nominations were announced last month, fellow alumnus Adele sent her an enormous bunch of pastel pink roses. The heartwarming lore, the intimate 350-capacity venue, the buzzy crowd: would Thursday's show at London's Omeara one day become an 'I was there' moment? It certainly felt possible. If she's on the cusp of something big, she's ready for it: a balletic star with the same earnest, self-assured charisma possessed by Adele and Raye. Is 'make the audience immediately want to be your friend' a class they teach at the Brit School? This gig took place as part of Brits Week in aid of the charity War Child, a cause that is close to Chinouriri's heart (her parents were child soldiers in 1970s Zimbabwe). Watching Chinouriri perform leaves you baffled by the major label executives who constantly attempted to pigeonhole her as soul or RnB – a situation so frustrating she published an open letter about it in 2022. 'Black artists doing indie is not confusing,' she wrote. 'You see my colour before you hear my music.' Chinouriri comes from a disgracefully short line of Black female indie artists: when she was writing those early songs at school, she might have been inspired by 2000s artists such as Shingai Shoniwa of rock band Noisettes and VV Brown, and more recently encouraged by the success of Mercury Prize winners English Teacher and their frontwoman Lily Fontaine. But the list isn't long. Live, Chinouriri makes total sense, her songs and voice bigger and punchier than her 2024 debut album What A Devastating Turn Of Events would have you believe. Second song Cold Call crashed open like Gossip's Standing In The Way Of Control or early Arctic Monkeys. Widespread head-banging accompanied My Everything, while My Blood evoked the intensity of a Cranberries song and closer Never Need Me the peppy fun of Olivia Rodrigo. Chinouriri may have sung quietly while practising at home as a teenager, so as not to annoy her parents: no trace of that on stage at Omeara, where she generated more energy than the room was able to contain. Chinouriri operates at the poppier end of indie: Dumb B**** Juice and It Is What It Is, the entire room two-stepping to the latter, were welcome nods to Lily Allen's tongue-in-cheek and very London brand of pop, and Chinouriri will support Sabrina Carpenter on tour next month. But she truly flourished during squally number The Hills (written during a lonely stint in Los Angeles), yelling 'when you don't belong' into the mic. She certainly belongs here, a Black British artist, uninhibited and brilliant, on stages that are about to get a whole lot bigger.
