Next Wave #1205: Good Neighbours

Good Neighbours were born from bad times. Oli Fox and Scott Verrill had spent years striving for success in the music industry. After getting to know each other as recording studio neighbours, the pair discovered common ground: working together made sense. The pair’s key concept is “blue sky energy”, harking back to the euphoric indie bands of the ‘00s. There’s intense nostalgia in their music, too. Good Neighbours aim to transmit both the melancholic and positive energy which nostalgia gives. “The songs paint an honest message but on a big scale. The little struggles when you’re growing up, but painted on a big canvas, with a big sound,” Oli tells CLASH. “If you can capture that energy and bottle it up, it’s great.”

Both band members are driven by a desire to remain honest, independent and unaffected by the industry machine they’ve seen first-hand. “We both had really similar backgrounds and paths in music. We learnt that you can say yes to too much. We lost ourselves, and then came back here,” Scott says. “We got a lot of rejection to the point that last year we were like, ‘F— it, we won’t make music for anyone else apart from us now,’” adds Oli. “There was beauty in being pushed back so much. We went completely into ourselves. That’s when the real magic started to happen.”

For Good Neighbours, “tapping back into the naïveté we had when we started,” is vital. That comes through strongly in debut single ‘Home’, which went viral after the duo shared a brief snippet on TikTok. “It was just a chorus. We put that up without the rest of the song around it. It went crazy and we had to hot foot it back to London and try to think of what the verses could sound like!” recounts Oli.

With a self-titled EP under their belt, there’s now plenty of confidence to share. But both Oli and Scott say that the industry desperately needs to provide more support to allow artists like them a better start. Many give up not for lack of skill, but for lack of finances, notes Scott. Good Neighbours have fought hard to get to a place where they’re having fun with their music, and are happy to see where it takes them next. 

“The best thing for us is to have almost no plan,” they say. “That’s exactly where the whole project came from. We’re trying not to stick to the norm.”

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