Inside SOFT PLAY’s new album HEAVY JELLY: “We walk this tightrope of absurd and deadly serious”

“This record has had room to grow,” says Laurie Vincent about SOFT PLAY's new record, HEAVY JELLY, out this week.

So much growth, in fact, that it's something of a rebirth for the band, six years since their last album. The punk duo rebranded in December 2022 from their original name, Slaves. After a few negative reactions to the name change, their ‘unintentional’ single Punk’s Dead birthed a new life for SOFT PLAY.

“A lot of our records have been forced out in a two-week session, and we've had to make it work," says Laurie. "Whereas with this record, we could keep going back to the drawing board.”

Guitarist Laurie and singing drummer Isaac Holman redrew their ideas in various different locations, including Laurie’s garden studio, to get creative with what they had. The results are as spiky and aggy as they are innovative and creative. There's also a sense of humour, and of provocative mischief, to HEAVY JELLY, like the knowing lyrics to Act Violently, or Mirror Muscles' ultra-manly, gym-based video.

“We walk this tightrope of absurd and deadly serious,” Laurie admits.

With a record of polished and thoughtful material to dive into, here Laurie breaks down HEAVY JELLY, one track at a time…

“This song came quite late to the album, before the last recording sessions – we had done five recording sessions in all. In November [2023], we were in my garden studio, and I started playing that riff. Isaac had these lyrics that were based on a conversation he had with his mum. He has a bit of a complex about being a good person and thinking he’s not a good person. He said that to his mum, and she said, ‘No-one is good or bad. We are all things.’”

“There’s always been this push-pull of whether we should try and write more palatable or anthemic music, something that might get played on the radio. But we put that song out because it felt like a really good starting point for the band in our second coming. When it came out, it was so well received – it got radio play, and it ended up being a single even though we didn’t expect it to. It made us realise we could go super-heavy, and it encouraged us down that path. I think the album is leaning a little bit softer, there are a few more electronic influences, but Punk’s Dead definitely gave us the confidence to go heavy.”

“That’s one of the songs that got written in the studio session. We had been out on a lunch break, we came out of a shop, and a scooter zoomed past. He was really close to us. I’ve got a bit of a personal vendetta against those things, and I said, ‘I fucking hate e-scooters!’ Isaac agreed. Usually in the writing process there are riffs kicking around, and I think we had been working on something else that we weren’t feeling. Isaac was coming up with this concept on the walk back, and when we got in I started playing all the riffs that we'd been toying around with, and that one was the one that stuck. Isaac usually goes, ‘Yep, that one,’ and then he matches the words to what I’m doing. I think we had it within a few hours.”

“That song comes from a concept I threw to Isaac. We have a management-type group chat, where I give him titles, or say, 'What do you think of this idea?' or, 'We've been offered this festival. Do you want to do it?' You’ll just see ‘Isaac is typing…’ pop up and then go away and then pop up and then go away. It can last for 10 minutes! He’s been diagnosed with OCD, and he admits that he finds those kinds of relations really challenging – he's obsessed over minute details. So, I said to him, ‘I hope this doesn’t offend you, but I’ve been thinking, the title, Isaac Is Typing... would be amazing because I see it all the time.’ And he was immediately like, ‘Yes, let’s do it!’”

“That was one of the ones that Isaac had pretty much fully written. He was late to the studio because he tried to take out his bin, and it was overflowing, and there was bin juice everywhere. For someone with OCD, that’s a massive clean-up job. He came to me with this really simple structure, I added my bits in, and put a little bass solo in, and it just came out in one hour flat. We were both like, ‘You think that’s good?’ ‘Yeah!’ It’s a real standout song on the record, for sure, because it’s a look into the way Isaac’s brain actually works.”

“Isaac was walking to his girlfriend’s house and he saw a huge cluster of, like, 20 worms on the sidewalk. He went, ‘Why the fuck are they there?’ and he was Googling, and that just led him down this rabbithole, where he says he’s done more research on this than any other song he’s done. It’s a factually-correct song about worms. And before it was a SOFT PLAY song, it was a rap, he had written it – and he had just rapped it to me over some random hip-hop beat, and I said it was too good to not be a SOFT PLAY song.”

“I was watching a lot of John Wick on tour, and for some reason, I was finding it quite entertaining but weirdly peaceful. There’s obviously four of them, so I kept watching it, and it became a running joke in the dressing room that I was watching it again. And then Isaac kept saying, ‘I’m John Wick, bitch,’ with a bit of back and forth of us singing, and everyone in the tour party kept singing that phrase. Then when we were onstage, I started playing the chords to it, and Isaac came in with, ‘I tried to retire and you set my house on fire.’ He always has words kicking around. He writes them in his spare time and works on them, but as soon as he hears the right chord progression or riff, it just opens the floodgates. We wrote that song in soundcheck, and then we played it that night on tour. It's about embracing what used to be fun about our band when we started. We used to write songs like that, and then go out and gig them. I think the more music you make, the more success you have, the more precious you get about it all, rather than just enjoying and playing the music and letting the music live.”

“Isaac had a demo for this for his project named Baby Dave, and I was just like, ‘This is so good, this has to be one of our songs. What if we make it a metal song?’ and I played this riff. Then I said to him, ‘It’s already amazing, but I think it needs a third verse,’ and I really pushed him to write another verse. Then we added in the different sections to give it the dynamic. It almost has this weird grime crossover. It’s an admission that he's one of those people [in the song] too, and being vulnerable in saying, ‘Yeah, I also go to the gym and look at my mirror muscles.’ It's him opening up as an artist and putting it all out there, rather than writing songs that don’t mean anything.”

“This was one of the first songs that we did, when I was doing a lot more bedroom demos and producing at the time. I really wanted to have that hip-hop crossover, so I made the beat for that one. The beat was quite complete before Isaac started his vocals, and it had this whole swagger about it that was still very SOFT PLAY. And then, the ‘Champagne lifestyle, lemonade money’ bit was something that his friend had said to him. That sentiment lead him to recount his misspent youth dabbling with narcotics.”

“That was a really early one. I felt like it was going down the route of being just another straight-up punk song, and then I felt like something else needed to happen. I started playing around with my octave pedal, and we came up with this weird middle section, where it’s Isaac talking to his therapist, and it really inspired the direction of the album, because we had come up with the title HEAVY JELLY. That part of the song almost feels like a bad acid trip, and then we started talking about how music can take you to a world. Maybe the world of this record is for everything to be turned on its head a little bit and looked at in a different way. I don’t think we fully followed that direction, but it definitely opened up the experimentation that went on.”

“I had the mandolin part, and we have this amazing chemistry where I might only play one note, and Isaac can just start singing along with me. Sometimes I can’t even write a riff if he’s not in the room. He just had that verse and a half on his phone, no chorus, and he just started singing it, and I got goosebumps.

“We had both been through a lot. He'd been through a mental breakdown, I'd lost my partner to cancer, we both lost our friend to an overdose… It had been a really heavy few years. We'd been discussing the topic of the song, with COVID, not being able to see anyone, not being able to see anyone’s faces when you did see them, and I had this note in my phone: ‘Everything and nothing.’ That became the chorus. It’s my favourite song we’ve ever written. It’s the perfect song for me.”

HEAVY JELLY is released on July 19 via BMG

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