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The Cover Story
Nova Twins: “It’s important to not stay too comfortable… Stepping out of our box was scary and fun”
Three years after going Supernova, London rock icons Nova Twins are about to leave it all on the line with their new album Parasites & Butterflies. Gearing up for an incredible next chapter of the band, are Amy Love and Georgia South ready to do it all over again? “F*ck yeah…”
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Photography:
- TAMIYM
Last April, Amy Love and Georgia South were in Vermont when everything went dark. In the middle of the afternoon, the moon passed between the sun and the Earth, plunging the Green Mountain State into a state of nighttime lightlessness.
The Nova Twins pair watched this cosmic ballet from the garden of record producer Eric Valentine, who was holding an eclipse party, so as to properly experience our nearest space-neighbour making its two-hour creep across Old Sol. Strange as it is to try to look at something happening directly in front of the sun’s face, it was nothing compared to the eeriness that descended when the moment of totality hit.
“There was this really weird period of calm,” recalls Georgia. “No birds were chirping at that point. The temperature dropped. The darkness felt strange, because it came on so quickly.”
After five minutes in this curious situation, as the moon continued its long and endless journey through the Heavens’ deep, empty vacuum, sunlight began to creep back in. Soon, awash with the warmth of the early spring, it was as if nothing had interrupted the day. If Amy and Georgia were in need of an illustrative metaphor, they’d just been given a good one.
“It was incredible,” says Amy. “The moon overshadows the sun, and then suddenly you had this huge contrast. We were like, ‘It's a sign that it's going to be alright!’ We're still coming out of that process of being human again. We've been writing an album, now we're in Vermont, after we've been in our bedrooms for months in the dark.”
This last part isn’t a creative description. Nova Twins literally had been sequestered indoors in their house on the south coast, beavering away on their third album, the follow-up to 2022’s Supernova. That record had, appropriately, exploded Nova Twins. For the next two-and-a-half years, Amy and Georgia had toured the world and other places. Rarely was there a day in their calendar when they weren’t booked on a stage, often in America, occasionally in Australia. At home in the UK, they’d bounced their footprints onto the boards at Download and Glastonbury, to name but two victories, at the same time as successfully petitioning the MOBO Awards to start an Alternative category, and performing at the Mercury Prize knees-up.
Such was the momentum, in fact, that it steamrolled through their plans. How about you do an arena tour with Muse? How about you hit America again? Which is why, when it actually came to writing part three of the Nova Twins story, they ended up doing it through a particularly cold winter in an English seaside town.
“I think we ended up going a bit stir-crazy,” says Georgia. “When we write, we’ll just stay in our room all day, from day to night, and we won't go out for a walk or anything. And in winter, the house is just dark because there's no sun coming through the window. I keep saying that this definitely feels like a winter album.”
Meanwhile, they had the loud tick-tock of the clock reminding them how long it’d been since they’d last done this. And where previously circumstances had afforded them the luxury of time to write, here they’d come out of the bubble of living on the road and straight into it without time to decompress, to being in the same place for a week on the trot.
“With the first two albums we had all the time in the world, which is nice and comfortable,” says Amy. “The first time, we had our whole lives to write it, and then the second album was done in lockdown, so there was no pressure. This time we had to get it done to a timeframe, and then it was still delayed because it wasn’t ready.”
On top of that, with so many successes under their belts, Georgia admits that a sense of ‘what have you done lately?’ began to creep in.
“I got really bad imposter syndrome – it was really dark and awful,” she says. “I was trying to fight the demons in [my] head that were saying stupid stuff, a lot of negativity. I was trying to swim above it and find positives, and just believe in myself again.”
And so, heading to Vermont to record, cheesy as it sounds, was in every sense where the sun came back out. At the solar party, they met their producer Rich Costey for the first time, a man with, among others, records by My Chemical Romance, Biffy Clyro, Deftones, Chvrches and blink-182 on his CV. The album’s title, Parasites & Butterflies, and its vibes of light and shade, good and bad, up and down, began to live on its own.
“Everything gets chilled,” says Georgia of the eclipse that preceded heading into the studio. “And then the sun comes back, and the warmth floods back in.”
Almost a year on, today Nova Twins are on usual radiant form. A couple of nights ago, they played an intimate, wild show at London’s Omeara for War Child’s week of pre-BRIT Awards gigs. “That was so chaotic,” laughs Amy. “We haven’t played London in a long time, and we haven’t done our own gig in London in a really long time.”
Things are already getting busy, though. As the pair munch through boxes of Pho upstairs in a Tottenham photo studio, they tell us that they recently dined with Janet Jackson at a swanky bash hosted by gents’ fashion mag GQ and fancy high-heel designer Christian Louboutin.
“We weren’t sat with her,” says Georgia, “she was at the head of the table. I think we were just there as seat fillers…”
Pfft, details. These are the sort of things Nova Twins get to do these days. Shortly before that, they were at the MOBOs, pyro-d up to the eyeballs, playing Monsters, the banging single that raised the curtain on their new era. Before that, in January they were in Anaheim, California, playing a fire benefit show with their old mate Tom Morello, and doing a three-minute jam at mega music convention NAMM. This Saturday just gone, they were on the telly, playing for smooth-talking chat show king and surprisingly astute supporter of bands Jonathan Ross. And, oh, they mention, as if remembering the last and least of a shopping list, they’re heading to Glastonbury. Again.
And, of course, there’s the album, out on August 29. As well as Monsters, they’ve just released Soprano, and suitably fierce yet danceable number, built on a sassy bite, a celebration of women throughout the music industry and beyond. It helps pull what to expect from Parasites & Butterflies into sharper focus: big, confident, a touch darker than before, a sense of having lived and learned and grown even bolder from it.
There’s a lot going on. Amy says that when Nova Twins get their heads down in writing, the results are “crazy detailed” demos, adding that when they took what they’d been working on to Vermont to get transferred into the studio, Rich Costey was astounded when he saw that some songs had upward of 100 recording stems to sew together.
“We threw the kitchen sink at it,” laughs Amy. “We always put the kitchen sink in, loads of ideas, because then we can take things out later.”
“We’re constantly fiddling with things,” adds Georgia. “We’re always going, ‘Oh, can we change this tiny drum part?’”
Both admit having to write within a window and to a deadline wasn’t the easiest new territory. Particularly since writing on the road doesn’t work for them, so they were effectively starting with a blank sheet.
“After a while we were just like, ‘We can't think about the outside noise or people's expectations or anything. We’ve just got to be true to ourselves how we've always been, and just write what we want to write and love,’” says Georgia. “But that was a difficult process to get to that point. It didn't come without tears and blood and sweat.”
“We were trying to find new ways of doing things – new bass sounds, or using my vocal slightly differently, just pushing ourselves in that way,” adds Amy. “We took what we learned from the past two records and evolved naturally. We don't really think about it. I think it just happens. We don't know why it just happens. We're like, ‘Okay, there, it sounds great!’”
“We always try to look forward,” continues Georgia. “We’re always looking at new things, and trying to invent things in different ways. It’s important to not stay too comfortable in what we've done. Stepping out of our box was fun… Scary and fun.”
One notable difference between Parasites… and Supernova is that it finds Nova Twins looking inward much more than previously they have. On Supernova they were a pair of video game superheroes. Here, well, they still are – particularly on the boisterous cheer-along N.O.V.A., where they loudly and brilliantly celebrate their own name – but this time they’re also facing the doubting enemy within, as well as taking on the entire world.
“It’s a little bit darker and maybe less cheery than before,” says Amy. “We’re not going, ‘We're gonna save the world,’ because we weren't feeling like that. But that's fine, because we're just being honest.”
“When we write, we don't necessarily write a concept album or anything. Well, not yet, anyway!” adds Georgia. “But as we had more songs come together, we were looking at the themes, and it was: beauty and chaos. There’s loads of chaos. It feels really chaotic, but then you could see the beauty in it, and vulnerability, and not being afraid of vulnerability, which we thought was really powerful. When we look back, that's kind of brilliant.”
“It feels really chaotic, but then you could see the beauty in it”
It's quite the surprise, hearing this. But, as Monsters has shown, with its, ‘I’m not afraid of monsters but I’m afraid of myself / Promised me Heaven but this feels like Hell,’ chorus, they wear it well, and as empoweringly as ever. It is, they say, “Like taking off the mask and the cape.”
“Fans are loving the vulnerability aspect of the song,” says Georgia. “They can relate to it. Everyone has their own demons, and they're trying to face them. So I think it was nice for them to hear us sharing that vulnerability.”
“People have got to be ready to be vulnerable,” says Amy. “A lot of us, especially with social media, we present our best selves most of the time. You get some people who are honest, and suddenly, when someone's honest, you see how everyone can resonate with it. Someone can be like, ‘This is the real truth about childbirth,’ or what I look like under my make-up, or stuff I have going on with my body, or illnesses, and so many people around the world relate to that.
“We are strong because we had to be, we've had to fight. And we want to make our fans feel empowered and bold, but we also want them to know that if you're not feeling okay, that's okay too. If we go, ‘You just have to push through it all the time,’ that's not true. Give yourself them moments to feel like shit.”
“People have got to be ready to be vulnerable”
A moment to stress here: Nova Twins ain’t complaining. That’s not their style, and that’s not the point. But a few years of travelling, stealing sleep, living out of a suitcase, eating weirdly, and then going and delivering what Amy and Georgia do – an on-point gig crossed with HIIT training – not knowing when the ride’s coming to a stop will eventually leave a person in need of a lie down. To pretend otherwise and not take a minute, as Novas have done here, isn’t good for you.
“We'd never done that kind of extensive touring before, so it was always the first time,” says Amy. “Everything was coming at us in a way that we weren't necessarily prepared for. It takes a toll, and you don't actually understand what's happening to your body when you're going from sitting in a van and reserving all your energy like you can't move. You're not exercising, because you're in a van for 10 hours. And then suddenly you have this big energy spike, you're going onstage, adrenaline is running through the roof, and then you crash. You’re doing that every day. And you don’t even realise it, but by the end of the tour, you've suddenly no centre, and you have no kind of balance, or any perspective of anything, and then it fucks you. And we came back feeling really hollow. You don't know who you are anymore.”
On the flipside, time away from the stage made them realise how much they need it. During recording, they bounced from the studio for a fortnight for a run of dates with Foo Fighters, their first shows in six months. It was a confidence boost, not just because having Dave Grohl tell you you’re good will have that effect, but because it reminded them what they’re doing all this for.
“We release a lot,” says Amy. “The type of music we do is almost like therapy. We have to get ourselves really psyched up to do that kind of show. You leave it all on the stage. When you don't do that for a long time… that's probably why we felt a little bit lost, because we hadn't moved like that. We hadn't given out that part of ourselves, and it can start to feel like a foreign concept to us.
“It's important for us to touch base on the show. Otherwise we get crazy!”
As they reflect on all this today, Amy and Georgia are as jazzed as ever. Georgia admits that writing isn’t the most brilliantly fun part of what they do – “We like having new songs, a new thing, but onstage is where it’s best, not picking over parts and ideas” – but what they’ve created is killer. Far from not knowing who they are, Parasites & Butterflies sees Nova Twins expressing these new things in a very Nova Twins way.
“We found our love for it,” says Amy. “As we went on, we would write a good song, and then that would turn into, ‘This is a great song, it’s sick.’ Then you'd have your ups and downs with it, and then we got to the end of it, and we’re happy.
“We've written a great album.”
“We came back feeling really hollow…”
Yes, they have. And the third age of Nova Twins is getting off to a strong start. Even a three-year gap between albums hasn’t altered their acceleration, although the band are aware that absence of music and from UK stages has been felt.
“People have been like, ‘Where have you been?’” says Georgia. “Even at Omeara, they were going, ‘Don't leave us again!’”
"There's so much pressure on artists to keep releasing, keep releasing, keep being in the media, but actually people forget how long you've been away when you come back," adds Amy. "Rihanna might come out with a new album all of a sudden, and everybody will forget that she's been away for, like, 10 years."
What they’re going to get when Novas return proper is a galvanised, more assured upgrade. Having been slightly tested, they know they can do this, and they know who they are. It’s already started to sharpen their perspective.
“Because everything was new to us, on Supernova, we were anxious all the time and anticipating what was next,” says Amy. “It was always, ‘Oh, we've got this, and we've got Glastonbury and this and this.’ We never relaxed. It was always on edge. But with the MOBOs and stuff, we were like, ‘Okay, we can be really crazy and anxious, or we can just let it go and try to enjoy the moment.’”
And the moment is just peachy. Amy gives us a loud “Fuck yeah” when we ask if she’s glad to be getting properly back on it again. And with even bigger things on the horizon – including a massive UK tour in autumn – perhaps the most important thing all this has taught Nova Twins is that they’ve got this.
“I feel like we just take everything in our stride,” says Georgia. “I don't think you can think too far ahead, because you just never know.’ We take every day as it comes and just enjoy the ride and the journey, because that's all we can do.
“When you learn the industry, you realise it's completely out of your control,” adds Amy. “There's no point trying to mould yourself into this or that, because it's so fickle. People love you one minute and they don't the next. It can be a thankless task. So you're best off staying true to your gut and what you need to do, and like Georgia said, just taking it as it comes. Because otherwise, you'll always be trying to impress someone, and you'll be running at it forever.
“The moment you let go of that idea, you'll suddenly realise that you're not just trying to strive for something – you're already doing it.”
The light is indeed coming back in. Now, watch as Nova Twins burn even brighter than a supernova. Even the moon can’t dim them.
Parasites & Butterflies is released August 29 via Marshall Records. Get your tickets to see Nova Twins on their October UK headline tour from 10am on Friday, March 14.
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