SOFT PLAY

 

“We’re like brothers in the sense that you can’t always be best mates with your brother, but now we’ve got it back. We needed to learn how to be friends again, and then all the silliness comes out of that - which is what was fun about our band in the first place,” begins Laurie, before pointing out by way of comparison to their current bromance-fuelled press shots: “On the front cover of ‘Acts of Fear and Love’, we’re in separate rooms…” 

 

For a duo built on this almost symbiotic sense of kinship, who attest to a “weird alchemy” that few bands ever reach (“Those riffs don’t even come out of me when he’s not in the room,” Laurie notes), it’s sad to hear that, as the curtain was lowering on their previous ‘Act…’, this was not the case. They describe their relationship as having slowly deteriorated from second album ‘Take Control’ onwards, a combination of internal self-doubt and external pressure pulling them ever-further away from the playful spirit that the band had begun with. 

 

“We were on tour and barely talking to each other,” recalls Isaac. “It all just felt super serious. We were trying to make serious music and rejecting that comical, fun side to our band; watching our peers a bit too much.” “[At the start], we got bracketed in with some amazingly talented indie bands because they came out around the same time as us, and you’re watching them all still get nominated for awards and you’re not,” picks up Laurie. “At the time, I couldn’t see the wood from the trees that we aren’t them. It was death by comparison, playing Ally Pally and thinking, ‘I can’t wait to get off stage and go home.’” 

 

On a creative level, Isaac remembers feeling like he’d “totally lost my way in terms of writing lyrics; I was so self-conscious and just found it so difficult.” On a personal level, both parties knew that, in order to try and salvage their relationship, there was only really one option. “We had a discussion that’s too personal to even share,” says Laurie, “but the nuts and bolts were: to save our friendship, let’s stop.”

 

And so, with very little outside fanfare, the pair quietly downed tools. Fans could have guessed that something was up, not least because both musicians soon began releasing music under their own guises - Isaac as solo project Baby Dave; Laurie as the fronting half of Larry Pink The Human, in collaboration with producer Jolyon Thomas. In reality, however, both projects were acts of vital artistic therapy for their respective writers. Having lost the mother of his two first-born children, Larry Pink’s material was filled with love and humanity. “I wanted to be at home for my kids and be able to cook them a roast dinner. I needed to rebuild my life,” he says.

 

Baby Dave, meanwhile, acted as a way for Isaac - who lives with two often-debilitating variants of OCD - to stay creative from the depths of a mental health crisis. “When I was really poorly with it, I didn’t even know what was real and what wasn’t. I didn’t know what were my thoughts and what was reality; I was really delusional,” he recalls. “I did that project because I felt like I needed to. But it definitely helped me exercise the muscles of lyric writing as well.”

 

Outside of music, Laurie started going to therapy. They began hanging out again and tentatively, in 2022, wrote a song. When an offer came in from Blur for the pair to support them at Wembley Stadium, they decided that, if they were to give the band another go for real, some things would need to change. “I gave a few ultimatums: you’ve got to start talking to me, and you need to go to therapy as well,” says Laurie. “Which I did,” Isaac notes. They also decided that, after years of negative focus, they would need to do something about their old band name, SLAVES, too.

 

“We’d be touring in America and a cab driver would ask what you’re over for, and I’d just be dreading them asking what the band was called,” recalls Isaac. “We just never thought we were gonna be big. We were young and stubborn and defensive,” nods Laurie. “So the two options were, we keep the name and we have to talk about it forever and be confident speaking about it. Or we change it. And I wanted to show our kids when they grow up that it’s never too late to change course. Now we can talk about it from a place of positivity; we heard that people were offended so we switched the conversation because the music’s more important than arguing about what the name means.”

 

SOFT PLAY, chosen for its imagery and symmetry (“and because we do spend a lot of time in soft plays”), suits the two lovable punks infinitely better. “Our band walks this tightrope of ridiculousness and deadly seriousness and now the name is the cherry on top,” says Laurie. They didn’t get the Blur gig in the end, but they did get their band back. And slowly, over a full year of writing sessions between school runs in hometown Tunbridge Wells - the longest they’ve ever spent on an album, and the most pride and joy they’ve ever taken in their work - came Isaac and Laurie’s fourth and best record to date: the equally brilliantly/ ridiculously/ quintessentially them-ly titled ‘HEAVY JELLY’.

From the opening moments of the record, in which a choir trill the chorus of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ before the band take over with their own pummelling introduction - “I’m the nicest dickhead you’ve ever meet” - ‘HEAVY JELLY’ is the gleeful sound of a band audibly having the best time they’ve had in years. Named after a Jiu-Jitsu instructor told Laurie to act like ‘heavy jelly’ by means of explaining how much resistance to give in a demonstration, the turn of phrase also mirrors the duo’s own worldview (“Life is heavy, but it’s also funny,” summarises Isaac), it’s an album that embraces the cheeky observational humour that set them apart in the first place whilst simultaneously amping up their heavy side to levels that the pair have never previously dared go.

 

The final piece of the wake-up-call puzzle came when SOFT PLAY released comeback single ‘Punk’s Dead’ last year - a teasing tidbit that dropped in the wake of their headline set at 2000 Trees Festival (not a bad booking for a band who’d not played in four years). Lifting aggyphrases taken from the comments section below their name change announcement and setting them to some of the gnarliest thrashes they’d put on record, the excitable reception to the track was a sign to follow their gut and go all in. “The idea for the music [at the start] was to make a band that’s a cross between Crass and ‘In the Belly of the Shark’ by Gallows, and I don’t think we ever quite got there. But releasing ‘Punk’s Dead’, I realised we can get away with this,” Laurie grins. “I’ve noticed that all the heavy bands get to a certain point and get less heavy, so there was this calcifying moment where we just went: Let’s fucking go there.”

 

‘There’ meant embracing their hardcore influences but also their love of nu metal and bands like Korn whose production - “so tight and heavy but clean-sounding” - became a touchstone for the record. It also meant stretching themselves as performers, with Isaac going so hard on his vocals that he would sometimes give himself a migraine and have to take the afternoon off. “You’d do another take and look like your head was gonna explode,” says Laurie to his bandmate.

 

Recorded over a year in-between the Tunbridge Wells Forum, Laurie’s garden studio, on tour and finally finished at The Libertines’ studio The Albion Rooms in Margate, the songs on ‘HEAVY JELLY’ paint specific snapshots of the world around them - take ‘Act Violently’, a rant against douchebags on e-scooters that was written after one particularly rage-inducing walk back to the recording room. Early single ‘Mirror Muscles’ casts its gaze around the sweat and skin of the gym; ‘Bin Juice Disaster’ tackles one particularly grim domestic afternoon, while highlight ‘Worms On Tarmac’ - which sees Isaac harking back to his pre-SOFT PLAY rapping days - is an apologetic lament to the wiggling creatures whose natural habitat we’ve collectively ruined.

 

Where previously, the pair had felt nervous about not being political enough, not being earnest or mature enough, ‘HEAVY JELLY’ is a joyous shedding of any of those worries; an album that, instead, leans into the things that only SOFT PLAY can do this well. Can you imagine any other festival-headlining band a decade into their career penning a thrashing ode to John Wick on their fourth album? Doubtful. But it’s these things that make the return of Isaac and Laurie such a welcome one. They’re a duo who - even before their name change - represented an unlikely fusing together of fuzzy-hearted good vibes and moshpit-starting punk heaviness. Now, they’re amping up both sides into a second act that’s bolder and brighter than ever.