Big Special have announced a new EP ‘O’Joy!’ and dropped the withdrawn, reflective single ‘Only Free When Sleeping’. Check it out below.
Set for release on June 5 via SO Recordings, the EP is announced following the recent string of singles from vocalist Joe Hicklin and drummer Callum Moloney: ‘Sluglife’, ‘Plaintive Native’ and ‘Dragged Up A Hill (And Thrown Down The Other Side)’.
The duo describe the forthcoming release as a companion piece to the work that has defined their rapid rise in recent years, and built from “all the fallen parts of our first two albums.”
Alongside the announcement, Big Special have also released a new taster of the EP in the form of new single ‘Only Free When Sleeping’.
The track, they explain, captures the same introspective, slightly melancholic feeling of the EP as a whole and reflects that feeling we have when the negative parts of life start to feel unavoidable.
“This is a head-down walking song. When all that shows up in observation is negative, when all news is bad news and you just look at your feet and curse the cruelty and the faff of the modern day and all the days before that lead to this feeling,” they explained.
“When you just wanna go to bed and let your dreams make up a different story for you to smile at, just for a little bit, until you wake again. Head down, stomp through another day.”
Discussing the EP, Hicklin and Moloney looked back at how they treated their debut album, 2024’s ‘Postindustrial Hometown Blues’ as a “long, drawn-out process of contextualising 30 years of experience into a piece of work”, but then saw the follow-up (2025’s ‘National Average’) as “ a spur-of-the-moment reflection on how our lives were changing, written performed and put together in a moment.”
Revisiting the “fallen parts” that didn’t make it onto the records, Big Special then “picked them up and took them back to the studio to rework them [and] make them into their own piece of work that reflects upon what we have done so far.”
“The songs that didn’t fit in the right place at the right time. Including songs that, at the time, might’ve made the albums too long and lean too far into a darker tone, where we wanted to keep the balance of an emotional journey, like watching a movie with your eyes closed,” they continued.
The duo also shared that while it “all seems like such a downer” they actually view it as a “positive thing to write songs like this [and] important to remember that songs aren’t pamphlets. They are emotional reactions to how you feel at a certain time, and you need to let yourself feel and express.”
“We wanted to give these songs their own place and leave nothing behind. We want to empty our clip and then go off to write our next thing,” they concluded.
“We like to move on creatively so we’re choosing not to hold on to a bank of work that can be repackaged when we need a bit of money or something, or to pressure us to lean in any sort of creative direction…When this is out, our board is clean, and we best get cracking with the next thing.”
Visit here to pre-order ‘O’Joy!’.
The duo are also set to perform at festivals including Bearded Theory, TRNSMT, Boomtown and more later this summer – visit here for a list of shows and remaining tickets.
The themes in the new EP align with what Big Special told NME in a 2023 interview, where they shared that their 2024 song ‘Desperate Breakfast’ was all about “getting up, shovelling a breakfast down and going to do a day that you don’t want to do.”
“That’s the most common thing amongst us all. It’s about how shit the cycle of all that is. It exists whether you’ve got a job or not – it’s a cycle of desperation,” Hicklin said.
Speaking about their previous jobs including as labourers, warehouse workers, the singer added: “We’ve done a bit of everything. This song is about being in a greasy spoon facing down all those bad jobs.”
“I have no negative feelings about it,” Moloney continued. “I actually have more respect for the people that do it than I do for anyone else because they don’t have a choice. Whatever is hard about this, we’re not digging holes, stacking shelves or serving some stuck-up bastard at a posh bar.”
