Meet Bug Eyed, the party-starting band delivering their own blend of future pop

If you’ve ever found yourself walking through the iconic graffitied arches of Waterloo’s Leake Street Tunnels on a Thursday evening in the last eighteen months, there’s every chance you’ve already encountered Bug Eyed without realising it.

It was here that the duo – Blue O’Grady and Charlie Sale – would blast their demos from a speaker system powered by a car battery after using the last bit of PRS money they had from a previous project.

“We didn’t have a community so we decided to make our own. From there, it helped us get a bit of traction,” they recall of long Thursday nights spent surrounded by other storytellers.

Now, their new EP, We Talk Thunderstorms Not Showers (Part 1), is the first taste of what the duo are truly about. It’s woozy, widescreen pop music that calls to mind the likes of Glass Animals – though the duo suggest there’s plenty more influences at hand too.

It’s all paired with a cinematic edge – inspired by the pair’s love of coming-of-age movies – which means they’re gunning for the widest of audiences while telling their own stories of youth, partying and getting fucked up.

You can read our whole Q&A with Bug Eyed below.

How excited are you to have this new EP in the world?

Blue: We’re so fucking gassed. We’ve been writing these for quite a time and this is the first half so it comes in two parts. We’re freaking out and a bit nervous, because these songs feel like our little babies and we’re giving us a piece us to everyone now.

We Talk Thunderstorms Not Showers is a pretty big title. What’s the story behind it?

Charlie: It comes from a song on the second half of the project. We wrote a lot of these songs when we were up at my window late at night chatting and smoking and a lot of the songs are written there. People come up and have these little moments and it’s always quite full on when they do that. It’s a thunderstorm and not a shower, so we thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s call the EP that’. We see the songs as short coming-of-age stories with strong storylines. I guess they’re all quite deep.

Is there any specific inspirations you’re reaching for on the EP? To my ears there’s a bit of the band FKA Easy Life and Glass Animals in there…

Charlie: It’s funny you say that because the stuff we made before was way more in that realm. We’ve tried to move slowly away from that.

Blue: We both like a lot of Steve Lacy, a lot of Bakar and Frank Ocean, I guess. That doesn’t reflect in the music necessarily, but we love Dominic Fike too. Growing up we listened to completely the opposite music as well. My parents were ravers, so I was mainly growing up on acid house and jungle.

Charlie: My dad was a bit of a mod – he’s a drummer. So I always grew up listening to Madness and Paul Weller.

You’ve previously mentioned a love of film and how that comes into your work. Is there any in particular that have been a real touchstone on your work?

Blue: Films that come to mind are Juno, Lady Bird, Moonlight, Moonrise Kingdom and Call Me By Your Name. We mention some of them by name in the songs. We want it to sound like A24 movie shit a lot of the time. The idea of how it would look if we were starring in them. I guess this is romanticising shit and making it feel a bit more dramatic and, ultimately, get into raw emotion.

With the music, we’re trying to feel as much as possible. We cry a lot, we feel too much so we thought we’d try and translate that in the music. That was fun as fuck, although it means I do throw up at the end of every song [because we’ve put so much in].

Charlie: I always say that if Blue throws up at the end of the song, it means we’ve done good.

Finally, you’ve got the Lola Young tour coming up. Excited to hit the road?

Blue: We’re freaking the fuck out but in a good way. To be honest, performing live is the only thing we’re good at! It feels natural and I think it’s emotional and intense and when we step in it’s like we’re just fully in it.

Charlie: I’m probably the most comfortable on stage – it’s where I live. I feel like as soon as we step on the stage we know we’re good at this and we want to make people feel as much as possible in that half an hour.

Blue: And it feels like something takes over. That’s what I think makes it probably a lot easier – these songs just spill out from us.