News: BIG SPECIAL DROP SURPRISE 13-TRACK ALBUM, NATIONAL AVERAGE. + VIDEO FOR LEAD SINGLE ‘GOD SAVE THE PONY.’

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The Black Country duo of BIG SPECIAL, Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney, have wasted no time in following up last year’s acclaimed UK Top 40 debut album POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES, dropping a surprise full-length album today. NATIONAL AVERAGE., the 13-track release, out now via SO Recordings and Civilians (AU), was teased with projections of the album’s artwork across London landmarks, and arrives alongside a video for the lead single, ‘GOD SAVE THE PONY’.

When BIG SPECIAL first emerged, their contorted mix of existential bellowing, vehement poetic polemics and soulful, sky-scraping vocals and hard-hitting punk instantly set them apart. Huge tours and festival headline spots followed, and somewhere in amongst the chaos of the ensuing year, the pair found time to write a new album, NATIONAL AVERAGE. It’s a record on which the band lose none of that early fire or potency, and instead expand their sound to incorporate elements of funk, lavishing it with their characteristic darkness and black humour, honestly representing their lives in the only way they know how. It focusses on brotherhood, pressing on through the changes in their lives, big and small.

Commenting on the new single, lead singer Joe Hicklin says: “‘GOD SAVE THE PONY.’ Is about the stones we carry. The different things that pull people down; the invisible weights that they have to drag through their everyday. On the personal level, it’s about reckoning with change. Reflecting on the moral obligations we have to ourselves and others and the mixture of the failures and successes in sticking to those. The weight of following a personal moral line is heavy on everyone’s shoulders. The song is a recognition of this strain in ourselves and others, and a well wish to keep going, whatever you have that drags behind.”

Continuing about the album, he says: “NATIONAL AVERAGE. is an album about the multitudes of a normal life as it begins to change. It’s about the stages of reflection on an average life as it moves further away. It’s about personal and political problems remaining the same as a life changes around them and they all begin to weave together.”

Where POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES was about desperation and hope, NATIONAL AVERAGE. takes those feelings forward and confidently charges through the confusion with gritted teeth behind a snarky smile. It goes down an emotional descent of picking oneself and society apart, whilst recognising the links of struggle that hang in every person, regardless of time and experience.

In the last 20 months, BIG SPECIAL has played Glastonbury, Reading & Leeds and toured extensively across the UK, Europe and South America with Placebo, The Pixies, John Grant, and Sleaford Mods. They made their Australian debut late last year, with shows at The Corner, Mary’s Underground, and The Brightside, joined by Radio Free Alice and Sex Mask. The band shows no sign of slowing down, with a run of UK in-store performances followed by headline shows and festival appearances stretching from July through to March. See full list of dates here.