Fresh out of a stellar festival season, Bicep have returned with their new single ‘Water’ featuring Manchester singer-songwriter Clara La San. The track comes alongside B-side ‘Waterfall’ which is an earlier iteration of ‘Water’ with no vocals. The duo revealed that they hadn’t intended to release water this year, but told NME it “took on a life of its own” having worked on around 20 tracks recently. 

Speaking with NME, the duo (Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar) explained their creative process and how ‘Water’ came to be. “Whatever we demo with, is almost never what we finish with,” McBriar said.“There was no outright idea when we started, but the original ‘Waterfall’ was born out of experimentation with an instrument called the MEGAfm,” they said, “It’s a new synth but has chips inside which formed the sounds of the SEGA Megadrive/Genesis games consoles. Weirdly it got more computer game sounding when we developed it into ‘Water’, speeding up and slowing down the lead line and LFOs to give that classic low-bit sound effect.” 

The pair have once again teamed up with Clara La San features on Isles tracks ‘Saku’ and ‘X’. “I just feel like Clara nails a little bit of every single one of them without being too much. She’s not too sugary, she’s not too lamenting, it’s sort of everything in between,” McBriar said. “Clara’s a machine, she’s honestly insane. It’s hard to believe that we get vocals from her sometimes and I’m like, ‘How was this not a year of hard work back and forth?’ She just sometimes sends it over and I’m like, ‘That’s perfect’.”

Despite this new single release, the pair don’t want fans to get too excited about a third album coming so soon. Ferguson has said that they are enjoying being more “fluid” with their production, outside of the structure of an album and McBriar echoed his comments saying: “Having done two [albums], it’s been amazing but we really craved that freedom of smaller bits of work.” “We want to spend a few years experimenting, changing up a lot, doing a lot of singles, and we’d like to be a bit more adventurous with some of the sound palettes and the layouts, and thinking about stuff a bit more abstract, and then inform that into a new album”

Bicep are heading off to Europe for an arena tour this month, stopping in the UK for two shows at London’s Alexandra Palace in early December. Both dates are sold out.

Upcoming UK Shows:

02/12/22 – Alexandra Palace – London
03/12 – Alexandra Palace London