Meet Most Things, the duo mining the surreal mundanity of London

The songs on Bigtime, the debut album from London duo Most Things, can feel incredibly simple. ‘Shops!’, for example, tracks a trip to the corner shop on any old day. The simplicity is also shown on the pair’s pared-down setup of just bass guitar, vocals and drums. Bigtime literally, according to the band, took less than an hour to record, bar vocals.

But the songs of London native Tom Phillips – joined by New Yorker Malachy O’Neill on drums – use this rudimentary base to explore fascinating and intricate ideas around mundanity, showing the magic that can exist in these seemingly dull spaces that they describe.

“It’s about this mundane, magic realism,” Phillips says of Bigtime, the first of a number of albums he’s written for Most Things, with at least two more finished and others beyond that to come. For now, Bigtime arrives via So Young Recordings this Friday (May 23).

Read our Play Next interview with Most Things and listen to them alongside other recent Play Next artists on our new Spotify playlist below.

You work on everything from writing and production to artwork and beyond – why does it need to all be in your control?

I’m really neurotic, and I struggle to let go of control of  things, but not for any good reason. I find it quicker to do everything myself. Most Things is my first band, really. I suppose it doesn’t look like that, but it is how I see it, as a band with me and the drummer. He’s also an artist and in other bands, and doesn’t see Most Things as his ‘main’ thing. It makes sense that it’s me as the face of it, but really it started as us playing together, and none of it would have happened if we weren’t playing together.

How did you settle on the bass and drums combo for the band?

I started writing with a bass, coming into it as a real novice outsider. It’s the first instrument I was writing songs on, but I wasn’t thinking about arrangements or adding anything to it. I was like, ‘I’m writing a song with this thing. Now I’ve got a song’. I didn’t have any big plans for a big band – I didn’t really have a plan at all. It just started happening. Wee both like singularity as a general intention with everything – to keep things singular and defined and simple, and in that way, reach something that feels new and exciting.

What does Bigtime represent to you? All the songs were written quite a while ago, but do they still feel fresh in their meanings?

These are all the first songs I wrote with bass guitar. I had done music and production before, but had never really written songs in that way. Because of that, it still feels very meaningful and very  true. It’s quite a complicated mixed bag of sentiment that the album carries. I tried to make it accessible andl tried to reach for some universality and express an ambient, mundane melancholy that I also find quite beautiful. That’s a big part of London. At the time of making it, I was living in this student house with friends and a lot of meaningless drinking and walking around and bus journeys and stuff. It’s about this mundane, magic realism.

Do you think that mundanity is especially prevalent in London?

That never changes, but there can be times where how you take it in and respond to it changes. Your subconscious can become  fertile ground for this mundane soup of reality, to then spark love and ideas. You can look at someone’s face on the train and see absolutely nothing, and then the next day, look at the same face and see like so much tragedy, or a whole story. I feel like that’s an English thing. It always feels like there’s this really seamless blank surface, like a painting of a pastoral countryside – a kind of posturing and politeness that doesn’t let you in. But then behind it there’s a whole story, and you can feel it instead of know it. There’s this tragedy, this drama in the walls and in the ground, in the routes the buses take. Sometimes it’s not there, and I don’t know whether it is there or isn’t. Suppose it doesn’t matter…