South Arcade are already winning big in America. And that’s before they’ve even got their debut album out. At they hit LA for a two-night stand due to overwhelming demand, the Oxford quartet look back at their road here, fans crocheting their own merch, and writing bangers about dead bodies…
Harmony Cavelle and Ollie Green have long wanted to go to Los Angeles.
They’ve thought of those sun-baked streets, flanked by palm trees, of the glitz and the glamour. It’s a place where everyone has a dream – and it might just become a reality.
For evidence of South Arcade’s inexorable rise, you need only look at the fact the band’s imminent show in LA sold out so quickly that a second engagement had to be hastily arranged. With the buzz they’re generating, they may soon be switching from soft drinks to something swankier in the schmooze capital of the world. It’s a prospect that Ollie, at least, is keen on.
“Please take this as an invitation that if anyone wants to take me for a cocktail, they’re more than welcome to,” the bassist declares.
People are already queueing up. If you believe what you see online, America is currently a dystopian bin fire run by a despot, but that hasn’t been South Arcade’s experience. The shows have been rapturously received, no doubt thanks to the band’s fusion of nu-metal dynamics, pop-punk propulsiveness and Harmony’s soaring vocals. Meanwhile, the experiences post-show, meeting fans thousands of miles from home in Oxford, have proved just as rewarding.
“I don’t know if everyone’s fans are like this, but ours do these incredible artworks of us,” marvels Harmony. “I can’t even draw our logo, but at one show this girl had crocheted me a jumper with our logo on the front.”
Harmony and Ollie also lift their hands to display the numerous beaded bracelets festooning their wrists, as further evidence of the kindness and dedication they’ve been shown. Someone even made the band a giant car key, a niche gift that references the sounds that punctuate their track HOW 2 GET AWAY WITH MURDER. That song, from last year’s 2005 EP, is among those that have catapulted South Arcade to where they are today, thanks to its irresistible hooks, even though its inspiration is as macabre as its title suggests.
“The song is actually based on Dexter,” explains Harmony, name-checking one of the few series she’s actually seen as she largely avoids watching TV. “The character is a serial killer and basically justifies whether he can and should take someone out or not. In the breakdown section of the song, we felt there was something missing, so we needed some ear candy to go there. So we decided that it should be the moment in the song where we cover Dexter getting the victim to dispose of the body. We hear the beep from the car key, the wheels spinning as he drives away, and the chainsaw noise as he cuts the body up…
“You can’t really hear it after that, because the boys’ vocals come in,” she laughs, “but if you listen hard enough, there’s actually a water splash, which is the sound of the body going into the water.”
One of the hallmarks of South Arcade, aside from mining early ’00s nostalgia and scaring the bejeezus out of K! writers, is their enjoyable use of social media. This includes regular videos from their rehearsal room, generally showing the quartet having a grand old time, jamming and winding one another up, while providing intriguing snippets of new tunes to their burgeoning fanbase. It can’t always be as fun as it looks, though, can it?
It is, according to Ollie, unless they get the balance between work and play out of whack.
“What usually happens is, we’ll spend several practices messing around, then suddenly think, ‘Oh, the shows we’re playing are quite soon so we better run the set and not spend the whole time just having a laugh.’”
South Arcade are at a fascinating stage in their career, juxtaposing the kind of big stage exposure they enjoyed this summer with dynamite appearances at Reading & Leeds, with the more intimate moments that have seen them earn their spurs. Having already played London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town in April with Bilmuri, by the time you read this they’ll have returned there under their own steam as headliners. Then they’ll head to Australia, where things will be mixed once again. It’s showing just how good South Arcade and their ability to turn it on anywhere are.
“It’s definitely strange,” Harmony admits of the contrast. “Bigger stages are amazing, though it’s surreal to have that huge gap between us and the audience, which makes you work to ensure the connection is there. But when things are more intimate, venue-wise, I have to be careful what I’m doing with my arms and legs, in case I accidentally take someone out! Getting to do that in venues over the other side of the world feels crazy, too.”
The gig in the capital coincides with the release of their new EP PLAY!, featuring the characteristically compelling single Drive Myself Home, as well as previously-shared tracks FEAR OF HEIGHTS and Supermodels.
So, essentially, they’ve been a band for about three years, have two EPs to their name, and are headlining a London venue that makes a real statement about where a new band are heading. It’s quite a feat, so what the hell will South Arcade be capable of when they eventually get around to making an album?
It’s a question Harmony and Ollie ponder. This is all moving incredibly fast. It was only in March of this year, around the time South Arcade played London’s KOKO, that the band’s four members quit their day jobs. A couple of them worked at the O2 Academy Oxford, with drummer Cody Jones in the venue’s box office, and Ollie behind the bar, pulling pints and opening bottles of alcopops, sometimes at club nights that meant he didn’t finish until 3am.
Harmony, meanwhile, worked in the city’s now-defunct hmv, often turning up to her shifts sleep-deprived after playing shows, and occasionally being recognised by customers for her musical moonlighting.
“I’d say no if someone asked if I was the singer from South Arcade,” she jokes.
But that was then, and this is now. Not that Harmony or Ollie have much of an idea of time at the moment. Only a couple of days ago the duo had been discussing the crew of three that’s on tour with them and how they felt they’d known them for absolutely years – turns out it’s actually been seven months. Talk returns to the prospect of a proper record and the weight of expectation to deliver on it, though the recipients of those expectations are keeping cool heads.
“As Ollie says, ‘You only get to do your debut album once, so it’s got to be right,’” reveals Harmony of why the band are taking their time on their first full-length.
“That’s why we’re doing these EPs at the moment. We’re finding people who like all these different areas of music and show them our different sides – the pop side, the nu-metal side, the rock side, the dance side.”
“It’s also about learning to make a bigger body of work,” suggests Ollie. “This last EP was pretty much written on the go. EPs are those stepping stones to get to an album. We’ve got this EP [PLAY!], then there’ll be another EP, and then we’ll do the album.”
“We actually like writing on tour,” says Harmony of a way of working that’s definitely not for everyone. “We have a vat of songs we could pull from, but we like to be reactive to the music around us and anything that excites us. It also means we can keep an eye on the songs that audiences like and respond to, so we can make sure to make more stuff like that, while keeping it fun.”
“I think there’s pressure,” admits Ollie, returning to the topic of their debut. “But that’s just unavoidable. There are many reasons it’s great to be in a band, but one of the main ones is that you can share that pressure, talk about it and vent about it.”
That safety in numbers is also beneficial to ensuring a high degree of quality control.
“It has to go through four people who all need to agree it sounds good before it ever sees the light of day,” reasons Harmony. “So you can trust it’s probably going to be alright.”
Ollie agrees. “Sometimes we’ve been working on a song for however many hours, you’re exhausted, and you think, ‘Maybe we should have a jazz fusion section here…?’” he says. “But, thankfully, everyone says, ‘No, don’t do that!’”
He grins.
“So, when we finally release the song and it does well you get to think, ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t put that mental jazz fusion bit in.’”
In an industry in which authenticity is a much-coveted but surprisingly elusive commodity, South Arcade have always made the kind of music they would want to listen to, knowing there’s a chance there are people out there whose tastes are similar to theirs. The biggest lesson they’ve learned from their pair of EP releases so far is to let making what they love be their north star.
“We knew that even if what we did flops, at least we’d like it,” says Harmony with a cheery shrug.
It’s this natural modesty that meant when they put their latest headline tour on sale, they did so with a great deal of trepidation, feeling fearful that they might have overstretched themselves – especially when the jaunt included a date in Dublin, and they’ve never even played in Ireland before.
And so the four sat starting at their phones as tickets went on sale, monitoring and fretting that perhaps they were about to find out they’d reached the ceiling of their popularity in the most brutal way possible. Thankfully, the promoters that told them not to worry were right, and didn’t have to buy Ollie the pints he insisted he’d want as damages if the dates ended up falling flat.
Unsurprisingly for everyone else, the tickets flew out and the stage is now set for South Arcade’s biggest tour to date. At the same time, you can also be sure – given their status as a band on the tip of many tongues – that more capacious rooms beckon.
“It does feel mental,” smiles Harmony, taking a moment to smell the roses of what they’ve achieved so far, before South Arcade head off on a whole new adventure.
“We can’t wait to see what comes next…”
PLAY! is out now via BKM Artists and LAB Records. South Arcade will appear at Download Festival 2026, which takes place between June 10 – 14. This interview originally appeared in the winter 2025 issue of the magazine.
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