‘Let Biffy Be Biffy’: How Biffy Clyro got it together to make new album ‘Futique’

“Let Biffy be Biffy.” That was the mantra Scottish trio Biffy Clyro repeated to themselves while making their 10th studio album, Futique. For the preceding few years, the band – frontman Simon Neil and brothers Ben and James Johnston – had found it a little harder to just, well… be Biffy. 

Being ‘Biffy’ has meant many different things since the band formed in Kilmarnock in the mid-1990s. The band spent their first decade together making intriguingly weird yet powerful music that attracted a fiercely dedicated cult fanbase that still exists to this day. 

It was with 2007’s Puzzle that the band hit the mainstream, turning some of their sharper and more obscure edges into enormous pop choruses destined for arenas and festival main stages (Simon calls that time “a turning point for our ambition”). The album was written just after his mother – a self-confessed hater of her son’s band’s music up to that point – had passed away. “I remember very clearly thinking after that, ‘I want my music to be for as many people as possible,’” Simon says. 

From that moment, and through the series of chart-topping albums that followed, Biffy’s music did duly become for everybody – including The X Factor’s Matt Cardle, who won the 2010 edition of the show with ‘When We Collide’, a cover of Biffy’s ‘Many of Horror’. Consistent sold-out arena tours and headline slots at Reading & Leeds, Download and more followed, with Biffy now firmly part of the furniture of the British rock scene and one of the genre’s biggest bands of the 21st century. 

While the world outside the band maintained a strong sense of what Biffy Clyro were, things inside the camp became a little muddier. Looking back, the titles of their dual lockdown-era albums – A Celebration of Endings and The Myth of the Happily Ever After – may have hinted at an identity crisis, and when the tour for those albums wrapped up in 2022, cracks began to appear that the band say, in retrospect, were a long time coming. 

“The last couple of shows [of the tour] were tough for us all,” Simon remembers. “I think it was a bit of a hangover from the pandemic, which we hadn’t really processed. We overcompensated during that time by making two records.” Instead, the frontman “screamed for a few years” with his aptly named side-project Empire State Bastard. “It was literally going to the depths of my soul to just kill spite and anger and frustration,” he says of the visceral music he made and performed live at the time. “I was out of melody and out of the wish to pick up a guitar,” he says. Meanwhile, the Johnston twins worked out how to be Ben and James, not “Ben and James from Biffy”. 

“It’s your whole personality, and everything that you’ve been building towards since you were 14 or 15,” James says, “so suddenly, when that is somewhat on a pause, you don’t know how to operate.” 

After their longest period apart since the band began, the seeds of the group’s return were sown when they rented a house in the Scottish Highlands over the Christmas of 2023. “Every morning, we’d wake up, have a coffee, and sit and play music,” Simon says. “That was our liberation moment.”

In that week, with snow outside and the band never changing out of their pyjamas, the members reconnected to the core idea behind their band. “It was like therapy without words,” James says, though denying that playing music was a way to avoid necessary conversations about their lives and future as Biffy Clyro. “I thought we’d do more talking, but we just kept playing.” 

“We’ve been guilty of that before,” Simon offers, of burying their feelings and letting resentments bubble. “We’ve all reached points where we’ve gone off the cliff and needed to open up, and we were very aware not to do that this time. But it was joyful. We would have sat and talked for six days if that was what we felt. But as soon as we got there, we realised, ‘That’s what being a band should be.’ It shouldn’t be this great headache. It should be the best fun.” 

For Ben, the album didn’t feel like “men of a certain age coming back together to make their 10th album”, but “like the first time we ever played together”. 

This reconnection with their roots was furthered when the band soon had to re-learn 80 songs from their first era to play celebratory anniversary shows of the Blackened Sky, The Vertigo of Bliss and Infinity Land albums in Glasgow and London in late 2024. “I never really had a moment to sit and appreciate all those times really, because you’re just doing it,” James says of the band’s early days. “It was really quite arresting to suddenly be confronted with this really complex music and be like, ‘Fucking hell. This is awesome to be playing these songs and learning things about us as younger men that maybe I didn’t really know at the time.’” 

For Simon, it allowed him to “strip everything back and remember a time where music was just fucking music”. Or, when Biffy could be the most Biffy possible.  

This ethos radiates through every sinew of Futique, Biffy Clyro’s leanest, most streamlined and focused album to date. Letting go of the relentless search for originality and never looking backwards, it sees the trio embrace the telepathic relationship they have forged as both musicians and friends over the past three decades, and rock out harder than ever on songs that feel quintessentially them. 

“At times, we have been very, very particular about not repeating stuff,” James says. “Although we’re still always searching for new ground, I think we’re more comfortable embracing our sound. You start to appreciate what we did have and what we do have, and the history of the band, and within that, the future of the band and what’s still to come.” 

Simon adds: “You get your sound as a band, and then immediately think, ‘Oh wait, we can’t sound like ourselves! We need to make a record that sounds totally different!’ This time, we realised that our identity is our fucking strength. Let Biffy be Biffy! We are a unique band and we’ve shown many different identities. I appreciate the people that have followed us on the journey. Everyone has their own favourite Biffy album, and that’s what gives me confidence in our band. We are really fucking good at this. I guess we should be after over 20 years!” 

“It’s Biffy distilled!” Ben says in delight. “Biffy cubed!” 

Across Futique, there are all the hallmarks of the best and biggest Biffy Clyro songs but written and performed by a band strengthened by their battle scars. Lead single and opening track ‘A Little Love’ is an endearingly earnest and simple track about grabbing hold of what’s dear to you, while ‘Friendshipping’ is another huge slab of arena rock. Touchpoints from across their career, from the frenzied and intrinsically odd music of 2004’s Infinity Land to the radio rock of 2009’s Only Revolutions are dipped into here to make something of a Biffy Clyro Greatest Hits album, just of entirely new material. 

On their pair of pandemic albums, Simon’s lyrics looked outward towards the “fucking dumpster fire” of a world outside their window. For Futique, he took solace and comfort from those with whom you can watch said dumpster fire. “There are things over my life that I haven’t enjoyed in the moment that I should have,” he says. “There are relationships that I haven’t cherished as much as I should have in those moments, and I don’t want that to be the case for me going forward. Whoever you’re sitting next to is probably one of the most important people in your life, and you’re reading the worst shit in the world but sat next to someone who is your entire world.” 

While an older version of Simon might have scoffed at the simplicity of an album about love, Futique embraces its fundamental position in everyone’s lives. “It’s all we fucking have,” he says simply. “It’s all you have to try and keep a hold of.” 

To make the album, the band headed to Berlin’s iconic Hansa Studios alongside producer Jonathan Gilmore, whose credits include The 1975 and beabadoobee. The aim was for Gilmore to be a conduit for the trio’s clearest and more instinctive thoughts to be transmitted straight onto tape without too much tinkering or overthinking. 

“It’s the first record where I sing a word and think, ‘Oh, that sounds like something from Infinity Land,’ and actually enjoy it,” says Simon. “Previously, we’d have run a mile from that. This time, we’d play something and say, ‘Oh, we’ve done a rhythm like that before,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, 20 fucking years ago!’ So, there are a few Easter eggs in there…” 

One of Futique’s highlights is the song ‘Woe Is Me, Wow Is You’, bursting with the kind of jagged guitars and chest-thumping noise that the band have made their name on. As the music cuts out, all three band members yell in unison: “This is too special!” as if exorcising the self-doubt they have been wracked with in recent years. When an archetypal Biffy chorus barges down the door straight afterwards, it makes the point perfectly. 

“That song is about being in a band and going on a journey together,” Simon says. “At points, you think about bailing out. Is it worth it? Is it the destination or the journey? A lot of people worry about the destination of what they’re doing, but the times we’ve had our best experiences are when we’re enjoying the journey. The ship will keep fucking floating,” he adds, quoting his own lyrics. “Sorry, I’m much better expressing myself in the song!” 

In the song, and across Futique, you hear the sound of a band shedding worry, comparison and progress purely for progress’s sake. “We’re not scared of what has made us who we are,” Simon affirms. “I do genuinely feel lucky to have these things in my life. You feel so lucky when you get people that you can fucking fall out with and still hug. Life is a series of small victories, not one giant achievement. The older you get, the more you appreciate that. You think there’s some overarching plan or journey, but no, everyone’s just flying…” 

“This ship is built to last,” he sings on ‘Woe Is Me, Wow Is You’, as one of Britain’s best rock bands enter their fourth decade and keep on sailing.