Nova Twins guitarist Amy Love says the band’s third album, Parasites & Butterflies, came out of “a shit headspace” – and their riff-writing was a bid to “put they joy back into chaos.”
Meanwhile, bassist Georgia South, who often injects heavy dubstep and electronic influences, looked beyond rock for answers in her pursuit of stark contrasts.
“In horror films, music helps you feel the tension in the air,” she says. “We wanted to do that with gnarly textures and weird turnarounds. It was a very cinematic approach. It tells the story of how we were feeling.”
The new music is another step in their fierce evolution; but with closely-guarded gear secrets and odds-defying live shows at their core, Nova Twins are more than ready for their next chapter.
You’ve famously kept your pedalboards secret – why?
South: “When we started people were taking pictures of our pedalboards to put online. It felt like a violation. We spent so long crafting and building our own sounds that we felt we had to protect them. What we love about that is, when people cover our songs, they find their own ways of doing it – expressing themselves with finding weird and wacky pedals.”
Is that how it was for you, experimenting with pedals to find your sound?
Love: “I just twiddle the knobs and see what happens! You need to find your own sweet spot and be adventurous. In the studio, our producer Rich Costey had loads of other pedals. One, the Korg Miku Stomp almost spoke. It nearly made it onto the album.”
Where do you find your pedals?
South: “Sometimes I’ll imagine the sound I want and research what pedal could do that. Once, on Logic, I made this sound up and I had to chain three pedals together to recreate it live.”
Love: “People send us boutique pedals too. I got a distortion from Champion Leccy and it made the board, it’s such a great pedal. Also, because our boards are so big, you can always find new combinations in there.”
What will you say about the gear you used on the album?
Love: “Guitar-wise I used a Fender Mustang, a Gibson SG, and I remember using one of Rich’s guitars. I have no idea what it was, but it was battered and it had an f-hole, which was really useful. We used that for bite, because of the top-mid you can get with semi-hollow guitars.
“Recently, I got a Gibson Les Paul Custom with f-holes to capture that bite live. Our sound guy said, ‘It's gonna be a fucking nightmare!’ But I proved him wrong!”
South: “I used a Westone Thunder 1 and a Gibson Reverse Thunderbird. Rich also had a crazy bass with EQ settings where you could get really granular. We used that a lot.”
What about amps?
Love: “I’ve got a new Marshall Plexi Deluxe head which is really great – it's so dynamic and you can get so much tone out of it, but it stays really quiet.”
South: “Fender gave us a Tone Master Pro, so I used that on the album, and also an Ampeg SVT and a Marshall Valvestate.”
How important is the amp when you use so many pedals?
South: “It’s so important. My board is too juicy for the Ampeg SVT Classic head – I've blown up two of them! But the SVT4 is a complete valve head, so you can EQ it perfectly. It’s such an important part of my sound now.”
Love: “Amps can really determine tone. I’ve previously preferred something more neutral. But the Plexi gives it this extra boost and bite and the pedals aren’t affected. You're really getting that overdriven amp sound. I’ve put my vocals through it, and it sounds great for that extra gain.”
How have you evolved as players over the years?
South: “We used to only write riffs we could play. Now, in our minds we can write riffs that are so complicated it takes time to make sense of it. It keeps you on the edge – if you feel comfortable doing something, you'll never grow as a player. You learn when you fuck up.”
Love: “We’re not trying to be jazz guitarists or amazing session players. We’ve created our own sound and our own space and we can only keep getting better at doing what we do.”
Georgia, you recently said that women “have to be exceptional to meet a man's average” – why do you think that is?
South: “Being black females, we always feel like we have to prove ourselves 10 times harder, because when we play most spaces, there aren’t people like us on stage.
“I feel there are many women that are absolutely shredding it – like Tallulah [Sim-Savage] and Lola [Sam] from Hot Wax, Jessica [Allanic] from Calva Louise, and Debbie [Gough] from Heriot – that aren't getting the same flowers as the men do. It takes quadruple the amount of time to build up female players compared to men.”
Love: “We also see a lot of men commenting on a comment like that with anger. That’s our issue. We don’t want an apology; we just don’t want to be harassed. And I don’t like comments like, ‘I wasn’t expecting that from you.’ Even though they’re not meaning it in a malicious way, subconsciously their expectation is completely different.”
And you’ve been accused of miming.
South: “We do everything live. We work so hard for everything to be organic; it’s frustrating that people still have their doubts. But knowing it’s all real is very satisfying.”
So how do you do it?
Love: “The record is one thing and the live experience is something else. There’s a lot of communication and delegating things to each other. It might be, ‘I need more space here,’ so we’ll add new sections to songs. With Monsters, we break it down even more in the middle eight so we have time to do certain things.”
South: “The pedal tap-dance is as much [important] as learning the song on the fretboard. Your hands and feet have to be in sync, and it’s figuring out ways to make changes feel smooth. If I can't make a certain button, I have to just figure out a way around it. If we got drunk before a show we’d be on the floor!”
Love: “Georgia uses her hands intricately, but her feet might be doing something else while she’s killing it as a performance. That blows my mind; sometimes I’ll think, ‘What the fuck is she doing?’ She’s got this confidence now, like, ‘I'm a fucking shit-hot bass player and I'm creating all this sound.’ It’s incredible!”
- Parasites & Butterflies is out now via Marshall Records. Head to Nova Twins for more.
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