BICEP

Belfast-born, London-based duo BICEP (Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson) release their long-awaited third album, SLUG, on 29th January 2027 via Ninja Tune.

Six years on from their last LP, Isles, SLUG sees the duo delving deeper into their distinctive musical identity, while embracing a greater breadth of sounds than ever before.

SLUG is also the longest record the pair have ever made, its eighteen tracks tracing currents of everything from rave and breakbeat to ambient soundscapes and lush, dreamy pop. “It’s like a journey” says Andy, “even for us it’s been a journey over the years. A lot of these tracks have been pieced together from bits collected over that time, alongside plenty of new material. We want an album people can listen back, listen back, listen back, and keep finding new parts within it”.

“Isles felt like a touch point between Belfast and London” says Matt, “and this one feels very much like London now. As you get older, you just cement into your own tastes, and this is probably the closest we’ve done to our full, wide taste; both in dance music and outside it”.

“SLUG is a refinement of the feelings and sounds of the past” says Andy, “sounds from the nineties which we only caught the tail end of, but they’re just stuck with you —I think SLUG is us being confident in all our unconscious influences, and forming them into a sound of our own”.

Since their last album, BICEP have resisted any urge to put their feet up. Following three years of touring for Isles, they embarked on CHROMA, a series of thirteen records mapping the broader reaches of their output, from club-ready breaks and techno to floaty ambience, all released on their own CHROMA label. With this came the rollout of their mammothly successful CHROMA AV tour, which saw them play an ever-evolving series of hybrid DJ/Live sets to over half a million people across more than seventy dates, including prime-slots at Glastonbury, Parklife and Coachella, as well as sold-out takeovers of Finsbury Park, Brighton Beach and consecutive annual takeovers of Drumsheds.

This experience, says Andy, was intrinsic to the development of SLUG, freeing them to chart the sonic path that forms, and informs, their new album. “We used the CHROMA project to fill a gap after Isles” he says, “to cleanse ourselves and look for freshness. You need to come into an album wanting to write a specific song, wanting to find something new and be curious. So we needed a couple of years in between”.

“There’s always a battle in your head about where to place things” says Matt, “and CHROMA allowed us to do the heavier dance stuff, and let us decompartmentalise doing BICEP albums the way that feels right, that fits”.

The result is a record that leans all the way back to the rich textures and melancholic feeling of the classic BICEP sound, reconfigured with the energy and drive which made CHROMA so impactful; a deliberate paradox where lush melodies, harmonies, and moments of pure vocal clarity sit in duet with grit, tape hiss, analogue clipping, fuzzy textures, and heavy low-end. 

It’s a duality which Matt says also informed the record’s title, and its visual treatment by creative director Viktor H, whose portfolio includes work for A24, Rosalia and Stormzy.

“SLUG came from thinking about land slugs versus their sea counterparts” he says, “which are incredibly psychedelic, free-floating, colourful and varied”. This contrast is evident across the record, which spans every stretch of BICEP’s DNA, from pounding impact to sublime prettiness. Notes of CHROMA’s raw energy can be heard on Edmeno’s crunching Amen breaks, its arpeggiated rave chords cranked all the way to redlining; in the heft and depth of Janus’s glassy synths and two-step drums; or in Viper’s jagged, threat-alarm rave stabs.

Paired with these, however, come moments of quiet reflection and wistful melancholy, as in the dreamy, trip-hop ambience of Horses or the pointillist synths of Lemonder, which gradually unfurl into a downbeat lullaby of washed-out drums and warm, lush pads.

“They help each other” says Andy of the variety on display from track to track, “it’s like a sketchbook, with these little ideas in between that tell the story much better, the highlights and the main chapters. You need them in between, not so much to cleanse the palate as to give an overview of the moods we’ve felt over the past six years”.

To aid them in this task, the pair enlisted the help of an unprecedented number of collaborators, from huge names to emerging artists, including Clark, Kehina, SOARR, Saskia, Eartheater, George Riley and many others. Both were adamant that these artists would be more intrinsic to the creative process than previously, as true collaborators with their own influences, rather than just session vocalists providing a sample.

“There was a huge amount of collaborators” says Matt, “and we involved them all from the beginning. The songs very much grew from these collaborations. So in many ways it’s impossible to talk about “our” influences without talking about theirs too, because it becomes a much bigger picture — Eartheater, for example, has got all her influences from New York and Queens, and Kehina brings completely different influences from her own upbringing”.

Their selection process for collaborators was pretty varied, too. “Every single one is a different story” says Andy, “we’d choose a track within someone’s music that we thought would complement ours, and there were only a select few we reached out to. Clark was one of the first. He came in with that energy and was able to bounce off us, highlighting parts of the demos which were really good and being quite honest with us about what we should do with them”.

“He was sending back two different ideas, two different songs, every day” says Matt, “pounding us with all these different ideas. So it was this sudden injection of massive creativity that got us thinking about ideas that weren’t in the forefront of our mind”.

“The collaborators planted the seeds for a lot of tracks” agrees Andy, “without them we wouldn’t have been able to make them. In a lot of cases they’ve taken songs in directions we couldn’t have taken them ourselves. Across the album, they have been absolutely amazing at adding new fresh ideas but not trying to be safe, and that’s what we wanted”.

These ideas are also being presented in a manner befitting their range, via three consecutive 3-track EPs, each with their own visual identity, dropping before the LP’s release. The first of these, ‘Air / Lemonder / Viper’ arrived in September, paired to an exquisite suite of promos by director Ryan Doubiago, following the progress of a single rave across three films showcasing the spirit and energy of the UK’s free party scene.

“Across the record and the visuals, contrast became a kind of North Star for us” says Matt. “We’re always trying to put things together that shouldn’t necessarily sit together, but feel much bigger and richer because of that contrast. The films let us take that outside the music itself. Free parties, pigeon fanciers, demolition derbies – they’re very different worlds, but they’re all niche interests existing outside the mainstream, with their own combinations of beauty, darkness and chaos”.

The third EP is scheduled to coincide with a sold-out return to the Royal Albert Hall in November, bringing the BICEP LIVE show back after a three-year hiatus.

“Each of the EPs is a different part of the album” says Matt, “a nice little taster to introduce fans, old and new, a slightly wider palette than our previous albums”.

“It’s gonna be interesting to see how people interpret it” says Andy, “I think everyone will find something they like within it. For me this is definitely a headphones-y album, but whereas our other ones were more mellow and you can listen to them quite quietly, this one’s in-headphones punchy.”