Our Girl - Comforting with songs

On a mild autumn evening in Zurich I met Soph Nathan to talk about the second album by her band Our Girl. Nathan is on tour with Big Moon, who are opening for the European shows of Glass Animals. When I point out to her that among the people queuing for the doors of the venue to open there are a lot of teenagers, and in general a particularly young crowd, she jokes: "Yeah, there are loads of really young people who've never even heard of us! But that's a good thing!". Six years have passed since Soph's debut with Our Girl, but the band can't wait to bring the songs from "The Good Kind" to the stage (hopefully on the continent too) and to experiment with new arrangements devised specifically for live performance.

I like that the album opens with an image of closeness. It almost feels like the intention is to comfort not just the person in the lyrics, but also the listener.

Exactly! I really hope it can comfort whoever's listening, and that it can also open up a kind of conversation.

“It’ll Be Fine” ties in thematically with the second song, but more broadly, being close to friends who are suffering – whether physically or emotionally – seems to be a central theme on this new album.

Yes, that's a great way to put it. I didn't notice it while I was writing, but throughout the record you can see this movement of comfort, in different ways, both towards yourself and towards the people around you. For me, writing songs is a bit of a tool for processing my experiences, very therapeutic in that sense. So it's natural that the relationships in my life – my partner, my friendships – end up spilling into my songs. But in “Relief” I'm writing directly to a younger version of myself.

How did you choose the album title? For your debut you used a line lifted from a song's lyrics; now “The Good Kind” is also the title of a track.

We wanted to try to highlight how, in a way, all the songs actually carry a positive, hopeful shade to them. It felt like the words the good kind summed up the emotions of the record well.

The song “Relief” is probably very personal, but I was wondering whether for you it also represents a kind of political act: singing on stage that queer people aren't alone in facing the discrimination that still exists in a very heteronormative society carries a message of empowerment for the LGBTQ+ community, and it brings us back to that movement of comfort and closeness we talked about at the start of the interview.

Yes, I suppose it is a political matter in a way. I'm aware that I'm very lucky to live in an area of London where there's a lot of room for queer people to openly express their identity, whereas unfortunately that's not the case in other parts of the world.

Is it hard for you to perform your most personal songs live?

Not really, actually. “Relief” was the first song we released after six years away from the scene as a band, and I did feel a bit exposed once I realised the audience would be listening to it and interpreting it on their own terms. But when we're on stage, I don't think about it that much: these are the band's songs and we play them as a group, even if in reality I'm essentially singing about some of my own personal experiences.

Visually, you went all in on red, orange and yellow. Why is that?

The artist Sophie Hurley-Walker made the paintings and worked with photographer Katie Silvester on the other visual elements. Lauren and I are pretty obsessed with the colour orange and with autumnal colours in general. We wanted a painting for the album cover and we knew it had to be orange, and that's exactly what we told Sophie. The image also needed to convey a sense of warmth, because for us, sonically, “The Good Kind” is a “warm” record.

As a musician and guitarist, do you take a different approach when working on a Big Moon song versus one for your band Our Girl?

Yes, it's very different, partly because Juliette Jackson writes the songs for Big Moon. The process is more collaborative now than it was at the start, but I've always valued my role in trying to recreate the sound she has in mind. In general, I like working on other bands' sessions and helping them realise their vision. Whereas with Our Girl's songs, obviously, it's a completely different story.

To wrap up this interview, I'd like to talk to you about one of your older songs, “Boring”. I really love how it closes your debut album with so much energy. How did you arrive at the final arrangement for that song?

It was one of the first songs I wrote and one of the first we worked on as a band. For the outro, Lauren started doing this strange, cool beat that at first Joshua and I weren't sold on, since it was completely unexpected. Now, though, when we play it live, the reaction is always super positive. The outro of "Boring", like other purely instrumental parts in our songs, is the result of the synergy that happens when the three of us play together in a room and fall into a kind of hypnotic loop during a jam. Very often we then have to cut certain parts, as happened with "Who Do You Love": in the recording studio we launched into a ten-minute jam!

(Photo credits by Katie Silvester; interview published November 8, 2024)

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