“In the last year, if there’s one thing that we’ve fucking discovered it’s the things that we should value and the things that we should cherish,” Biffy Clyro frontman Simon Neil tells NME as we sit down to talk around life during the making of their new album, ‘The Myth Of The Happily Ever After‘. “A lot of other stuff is just extraneous noise that we can put into the background.
“All I want to feel coming out of this is just that I love the people I love more than I did – and that the things that are important are the things that I have closest to me. I don’t want to have anything that’s unnecessary kicking around. Emotionally, the way is just to look for loving in your life. I sound like a total fucking hippie, but it was a year for that!”
It certainly was. The band’s previous album, 2020’s diverse but punchy ‘A Celebration Of Endings’, may have been written pre-pandemic – but it’s themes of cultural reset and reckoning seemed only too prevalent when the record landed into a locked down world. Still, much had changed. That’s when they went back to the drawing board to revise everything they thought they knew about life and the cards we’d all been been dealt, to return with a much wiser and necessary collection of songs.
Reviewing the album, NME concluded that: “Adventurous in sound, buoyant in spirit and with ideas aplenty, Biffy’s 10th album is one hell of a happy accident.
“What could have been a hodgepodge of would-be B-sides and ideas found down the back of the sofa has turned out rather differently. Yes, ‘The Myth Of The Happily Ever After’ outshine its predecessor, but it could also – ironically – be the most cohesive Biffy album to date.”
That’s no mean feat. For a true and full glimpse into what went into the record, watch the video above as Neil along with Ben and James Johnston sit down with NME to talk us through the lyrics, meaning and recording of each and every song on their 10th album – and how it was inspired by pandemic life, political cults, environmental catastrophe, an unlucky Japanese racehorse, West End musicals, love, death, depression, empathy and “trying to find strength through a really hard time”.
‘The Myth Of The Happily Ever After’ is out now.