QR Music: Interview With Our Girl - Very Welcomed Strangers

One Friday night in London, two months of revoltingly sticky, 30-something degree weather was interrupted by a colossus of a thunderstorm. Perfectly in tune with it, Our Girl were getting ready to play Bermondsey Social Club for Yala! Records. Roughly a month later, the Brighton-via-London trio’s debut record Stranger Today was gifted to us, a collection of songs so visceral and intuitive that it felt like we’d always known them.

Sitting in the smoking area with frontwoman Soph, who lends her talents as lead guitarist to The Big Moon, we discuss falafel wraps over the rain. “Oh, yeah,” she says, as though she’d forgotten, when I mention last year’s Mercury Prize nomination. “I just have a really bad memory. I can never remember the venues we’ve played. You have to describe it like ‘We had that pizza in that place’ and I’ll be like ‘Oh yeah!’”

A band of double agents, bassist Josh also plays guitar in Breathe Panel. Their brilliantly dreamy debut album was released only a few months earlier, making Our Girl experts in manoeuvring clashes within the indie band timeline. “It’s just communicating well, and a lot of ical. Big Moon are having a break to write our second album so this is a good time for us to do it, and Breathe Panel just had the natural time to do theirs. We all want each other to do those things, it’s just finding the time.” I joke that drummer Lauren is the only committed member. “She’s just a hard-working woman,” laughs Soph.

Stranger Today, is a culmination of four years spent writing and demoing, honing their distinct garage-fuzz sound by touring with the likes of Marika Hackman and The Magic Gang, packaged into a perfectly unpolished 45-minute record. The suggestion, courtesy of manager Tim, to work with Bill Ryder-Jones as producer was a stroke of genius. “A really good fit,” says Soph. “He produced a record for The Wytches, which we love. I listened to his stuff and was like ‘This is amazing’ and then we went up to where he lives in Liverpool and had a day in the studio. We went the night before, so we basically had a sleepover with this guy we didn’t know. A really good day. We had pizza.” A common thread, as the band order some for tonight.

Released prior to the album, ‘I Really Like It’ radiates a euphoric warmth in its simplicity, accompanied by a bedroom session recording of Soph playing the track in their living room. “It’s definitely the happiest song I’ve written, the happiest song on the record. It’s funny, the contrast- just different stages of life…It’s about my girlfriend [redacted]. Actually, maybe you don’t know her name.” A crash of thunder and the name was lost forever. “It’s one of the most recent songs I’ve written, it was really nice to write.” You can hear that, I think. “Can you? Feels nice to play as well, feels a bit refreshing. I mean not as a song, but to me,” she laughs. “It’s really refreshing to hear music like that these days!” she mocks.

Accompanying the dark and ethereal bass-led ‘In My Head’ was a fittingly surreal stop-motion music video, directed by Tayo Kopfer and influenced by Michel Gondry’s film Science of Sleep. “Lauren and I especially really like that film. We didn’t realise until we were thinking about what we wanted to do for this next video that we wanted it to be stop motion. Lauren mentioned it and I was like ‘That’s exactly it’. I haven’t seen it in years. It’s quite a surreal thing, like a memory.”

The record follows up 2016’s Normally EP and includes tracks penned around the same time. The painstakingly beautiful ‘Level’, of which the title Stranger Today is borne, was one of the band’s first ever releases. “I think when we do the next one it might feel more like a new thing, a new step. This album is sort of us in the past four years, up to this point. We really wanted to make it sound like we do live or reflect the energy of that, maybe. I really liked the EP, but it didn’t fully sound like us, I think. We’ve been able to have the time to figure that out.”

For Our Girl, key to keeping focus is having various creative projects through which they can explore different sonic routes, as Soph and Josh do in The Big Moon and Breathe Panel respectively. “It’s really nice, and they are very different. I feel lucky that I get to do both. They both give me a lot in different ways.” As she tells me that shares a house with Josh and his Breathe Panel bandmate Nick, I suggest a super-group of breathless, transcendent guitar-fuzz. “Yes, that’s what I was going to say,” she jokes.

Finally ready to give this four-year chunk of themselves to the world, Soph says “I think just let people respond [how they want]. With lyrics, you might think it’s something else that resonates with you in some way... Yeah, I hope they like it.” We really, really do.

Stranger Today is out now via Cannibal Hymns.

By Addison Paterson