two blinks, i love you

“SELECTS” Pitchfork

“SPOTLIGHT ON…” The Independent (Q&A)

“cleverly written lyrics, soft vocals and light guitar riffs” The Evening Standard

“high-stakes vulnerability” The Line of Best Fit

“atmospheric and intoxicating” CLASH Magazine

“a more mature turn musically” DORK Magazine
 

SEPTEMBER 25th - Liverpool songwriter two blinks, i love you announces ep 2 for release on November 22nd via Heist or Hit, and shares new single ‘better the knife you know’.

An aesthetic ode to NYC the new EP pulls at the early 2000s alt-rock and folk output of the city. AKA Liam Brown, his structures lean on minimalist design philosophies; an example of prioritising only the essential. In this way, his music economically grants transit to those themes and sonic motifs that cut to the emotional core.

‘better the knife you know’ was written and recorded in an hour. Balancing the pin-drop intimacy of early two blinks with studio sheen, dizzying handclaps act as a bed where intricate folk guitars spoon uplifting glockenspiel & dour violins. The lyrics are a stream of consciousness. A conversation with self. The focus being on when people start to drift apart and how we fall back into the tendencies of the style of person we were before the relationship. An island mentality and a bit colder to everything in turn.

On the track Liam explains:

“‘better the knife’ was the first track we recorded together and it kind of set the standard of how fast we ended up working. When I wrote the demo (which essentially is how you hear it on the ep) it was probably the quickest I’d ever written a song before, I felt like I knew exactly how it was going to sound. It was a really exciting moment, and a very focused level of creating something - which I hadn’t felt that intensely before. The demo was written, recorded, and sent over to the label within an hour! 

Thematically, there’s quite a lot of post relationship feelings in there, going back to your old life after leaving somebody and becoming a kind of island again, there’s also lots about coming back from New York and feeling a bit flat and desensitised from such a strange trip. It’s a kind of diary entry for a lot of feelings at that particular time I think.”

The aforementioned pilgrimage to New York late last year allowed Liam to live out his inner Fran Lebowitz fantasies. Cocooned in overpopulation, he found himself drunk & alone, singing the Human League at a karaoke bar after watching the Knicks in Madison Square Garden. The following morning, hungover and pairing a McGriddle with a black coffee he cut a figure of stillness while the iconography of the city shimmered all around him like fish scale. “I’ve always attached a lot of emotional weight to exploring ideas of feeling small and alone in a big city where there is so much energy and life.”

Alongside label Heist or Hit, it was deemed that in order to grasp at the atmosphere of the great Gotham, transplanting two blinks from the bedroom to the studio would be an important next step for the sound. More polish than spit. With Liam at the helm as producer, tracking took place at Nan’s House in Liverpool with Sophie Ellis engineering and mixing. “She facilitated and transferred all my creative decisions and ideas practically without any friction, which was super important to me. We worked rapidly, how I like to work, and it felt like there existed so much alchemy in our spontaneity.”  

Whilst the level of polish is increased in the sound - it still centres on coarse human emotion:

“ep 2” as a whole is combing through a lot of different feelings over the past year. Some of the songs on here are quite retrospective about loss. It presents itself in different ways that I didn’t even recognise until listening to them back; at the time I thought it was hidden in lots of subtext but in actuality it wasn’t. Some of the other songs however, are more love songs. I always love how direct and charming a plain and simple love song can be, not particularly the most poetic or the most dramatic by any means, but speaking of the smaller insignificant things and the idiosyncrasies of moments unique to your experience with love and everything surrounding that, whether that be friendship, the city you live in, or the city you visit for a week.”

ABOUT two blinks, i love you

two blinks, i love you springs from the prolific mind of Liverpool-based songwriter Liam Brown, previously known for his work as pizzagirl - where he built zany, aesthetic bedroom-pop worlds across two albums admired by VICE (Noisey), The Guardian, The FADER, PASTE, BBC 6Music and Radio 1, and more. 

Liam emerged in this new guise with the austere but emotive debut single ‘i love you’, which heralded his debut project ep 1 - which also featured the singles ‘carnegie hall’, ‘birthday surprise’ and ‘loveseat’. Last October’s scuzzy exploration ‘sentiment’ provided a stylistic evolution and placeholder.

He quickly caught the attention of Pitchfork, The Independent, The Evening Standard, The Line of Best Fit, CLASH, DORK and more with a finely honed sound calling to mind the wistful off-piste ruminations of Alex G, Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, The Mouldy Peaches or Wilco.

two blinks, i love you embraces the charm of imperfection, and the plaintive beauty of not knowing everything. Rather than hiding behind any misdirection he leans into this, and exposes an honest picture of himself.