Our Girl

Our Girl are enchanting everyone with their heavy yet ethereal guitar tunes that take queues from both nineties grunge and catchy modern indie. They’ve just released their impressive debut, ‘Stranger Today’, produced by The Coral’s Bill Ryder Jones, which is as impactful and as glorious as the band’s live sound. We had a chat with singer, guitarist and songwriter Soph Nathan, as she took some much needed time off with her family in the South of France.

Q: With Our Girl being a Brighton based band, I’m interested to know, what led you to move to Brighton in the first place?

A: Well I was actually studying music there. I mean, the music scene is amazing but I had no idea how great it was until I was there and part of it, I just moved there because I liked the town. The best part about studying there was the people that I met from all different unis. I made so many friends that play music! I lived with a lot of bands like The Magic Gang and Abattoir Blues. We had this basement downstairs that we called the Dungeon - because it was really gross - that everyone would practice in, so even if you were chilling in the living room you would just constantly hear music as there was always someone playing downstairs.

Q: That must have been so inspiring! All that creative energy must have spurred you on to write more and more songs…

A: Definitely! It made me feel confident, because everyone around me was making music and encouraging me to do the same. So yeah, I might have done it anyway, but I would have been more shy about it.

Q: Your songwriting is so personal. Is it ever frightening to put your personal thoughts and feelings out there for everyone to hear?

A: Yes, it is!! And they’re always about someone which is a scary part of it. It’s funny when you hear a song by someone you don’t know and it’s about something personal, to think about who they may have written it about. But if you’re the person who’s being written about or the artist who’s written the song, it’s a pretty intense thing... I don’t feel scared about it anymore though. A lot of these songs I’ve been playing for a while and I guess I stopped thinking about it in that way. They still mean things to me, but I just see them as songs now. When a song is fresh and new it’s more nerve wracking in that way, but when you’ve been playing it for a while, it just becomes what it is, and you start thinking about it from a musical point of view - how you can make it more impactful or sound a certain way, which adds more to the sentimental side of it and gives it another level.

Q: With the recording of the album, did you arrive with ideas of how you wanted it to sound? Or did you go with the flow? It was produced by Bill Ryder Jones of The Coral which must have been very exciting!

A: He’s so great, he’s amazing at guitar! We went into the recording, thinking “okay, we’ve been playing these songs for a few years now, we know what we want.” We basically wanted to be how we are live but sound bigger and be able to experiment with more sounds and more percussion and extra guitar lines - because that’s stuff we can’t do live but we could do in the studio, stuff that we heard in our heads that we couldn’t do live. But it felt pretty straight forward really. Bill added a lot in terms of ideas, guitar lines and drones, that I actually think transformed the songs and made them a lot better. Bill was perfect for us. It was such an intense experience though!. Since it was a residential studio we were there 24/7. We’d go till one or two in the morning and start at like nine. I felt very wired and drained - but in a good way! It was like this is our chance and I want to put everything into it. I think it suited the album to get lost in it.

Words by Eleanor Philpott | Illustration by Taylor Benson