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Nova Twins vocalist-guitarist Amy Love is trying to make me feel better about the litany of things that have gone wrong during our one-hour chat. She and her bandmate Georgia South entered the shabby-chic dressing room of London’s Omeara in a whirlwind of denim, arraying themselves on the mismatched armchairs after a soundcheck that didn’t entirely go to plan – my Dictaphone broke, South’s battling a cold, I realised I had the wrong notebook with me … We’re all feeling a little frazzled as trains rumble by and South boils the kettle for a Lemsip.
The fact chaos swirls around Nova Twins is fitting, perhaps. Their brand of boot-stomping rock takes the pop and R&B music they’d grown up with and distorts it to hell. Nu-metal adjacent, they play a kind of grimy rap-rock with the energy and hooks of the pop end of punk.
Their first album as Nova Twins, Who Are the Girls?, was released in 2020 and with lockdown denying them a traditional touring and promo cycle, they threw themselves into writing its follow-up. Supernova (2022) was a rush of brash, powerful adrenaline that catapulted them into the rock music primetime. They garnered famous fans – Elton John said “These girls rock my world”, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello told NME they are one of his favourite bands; huge stadium support slots with Bring Me the Horizon and Muse; a Mercury prize nomination and two solid years of touring the world with a stage show that has all the energy of a can of Monster after five minutes in an industrial paint shaker.
Suddenly they were famous, successful and contractually obliged to write another record in a tight time frame having spent two years doing nothing but sitting in a van. While they were away from home, friendships and relationships were hard to maintain. “Eventually … the texts stop coming,” Love says sadly. “It does take a mental toll – and you don’t realise [at the time, on tour] because you’re excited and then you’re like: ‘Why are we crying suddenly for no reason?’ It really throws you off balance. And when you come home, you’re a robot. You feel hollow.”
The Twins – not actual twins, but rather old, perfectly matched friends (what did they do on those long van rides? “Honestly we just yapped the whole time”) first met in their teens, when Love dated South’s brother: she became part of the family – the two girls even shared a bedroom – and eventually they started making music together. An early iteration of the group was named BRAAT way before the lime-green album was even a twinkle in Charli xcx’s eye, and their first song tumbled out of them amid giggles on the sofa. “Bad Bitches” – “It was just bass and vocals,” South recalls, “and we were like, oooh this is cool …” But this time, nothing was tumbling out of anywhere.
Slowly, as they decompressed from the tour and started engaging with “real life” again, reconnecting with friends and spending time enjoying London, themes and ideas started coming up. Third album Parasites & Butterflies is alive with that feeling of separate existences: it pings from serpentine hellfire (Glory) to kick-you-in-the-face rawk (Monster) to Beastie Boys-esque chanting (N.O.V.A.) and potent balladry (Hummingbird). On Supernova, they felt they had to be basically superheroes, relentless with manic positivity and power; the album has a hint of dread. “There’s a kind of dark undertone – which is reflective of where we were at the time – but in a good way,” Love says. “It’s open. Honest. Because we’re not all happy and super-strong 100% of the time.”
The Twins made a conscious decision not to use any synths on the album – all the sounds are made using guitars (Love) and bass (South) with vast boards of effects pedals to manipulate their output. “We’ve always pushed ourselves to do things really manually live,” South says. “And I think being women in music … people don’t question men. So they can have everything on the track and they can still be ‘the greatest’ – people won’t question if they’re playing live, they won’t question if they wrote their riffs, or if they’re miming, or anything. Because we were women going into it – and Black women – we were like: we need to play everything, do everything.”
It might have started as a reaction to the misogynoir that dogs heavy rock genres but it turned out to be an integral part of a Nova Twins show, with South in particular marshalling two vast planks of pedals at her feet, stomping on them periodically to take her bass from a muscular strut to a thundering dubstep fuzz.
Growing up in Essex and south London respectively, Love and South dealt with varying degrees of racism (Love is of Iranian and Nigerian descent, and South is of Jamaican and Australian). When they were playing endless toilet venues and open mic nights around the capital, they soon felt like outsiders in the notoriously white, male world of heavy music. “We couldn’t really see where we fit in,” Love says. “We’re like the only women on the bill, definitely the only Black people on the bill, or were at the time when we first started. And it would be like, well, we don’t quite belong here but the audience are really receptive to us. And then we’d be like, we didn’t really fit in the R&B hip-hop world, either.”
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In 2021, they campaigned for the Mobos to add an alternative music genre to acknowledge the influence of Black rock’n’roll pioneers such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard. The committee listened and in 2022 added the best alternative music act award (the Nova Twins were nominated) and at this year’s show they took to the stage with a blistering performance of Monsters that felt pointedly like a victory lap.
Where communities don’t exist for the Nova Twins, they are not afraid to stride in and demand space. As well as the Mobo campaign, they recently launched a scholarship for music education at London’s ICMP (Institute of Contemporary Music Performance) – and get Love on the topic, she will speak passionately for hours about making room for rock in the mainstream. “There’s a huge audience [for rock] and so much love for it but for some reason, some gatekeepers feel like: ‘Oh, that can’t be on daytime TV,’ like it’s a swear word or something? Like, who said? And why? Instead, they’d rather put something they found on TikTok than a band that’s spent like 10 fucking years honing their craft and musicianship on stage.”
Waiting out there in Omeara is a crowd of diehard fans that is impossible to categorise – old headbangers, mani-pedi office workers, kawaii rockers; it runs the gamut. The show (part of the Brits Week War Child gigs) is a blistering hour of music from a band who are fighting for more for everyone. “OK,” Love says, putting her hands out flat in front of her. “If that doesn’t exist, let’s create it.”
Parasites & Butterflies is released on 29 August on Marshall Records.
