ON THE RISE
M.O.T.H.E.R. – the new collaborative band helmed by Robbie Furze of The Big Pink and currently featuring Jamie T and Jamie Hince of The Kills – have given their first proper interview, talking to NME about the emotional origins of the project, their aim to be “the guitar version of N.E.R.D.”, and their hit-list of future collaborators.
Revealing the new project at the end of May alongside the blistering anthemics of debut single ‘My Love’, Furze shared that the seeds of M.O.T.H.E.R. had come from losing his own parent after a prolonged illness. “My mum got sick about five years ago and was ill for about four years before she died,” he told NME.
“In that period I had a daughter, which was this real juxtaposition of death and birth. My mates – Jamie T and Jamie Hince – came together for me, and then sadly Jamie [Hince] lost his dad too,” Furze went on, sitting in a West London pub alongside Hince.
Hince continued: “I lost my dad four days after Robbie [lost his mum], and it felt like, if ever there was a calling, it was that. But it didn’t all come out of that doom and gloom. I hate mentioning COVID but everyone had so much time on their hands and there was this open creativity back then. I was working on music with Jamie T, sending each other stuff, and the idea for the three of us to do something together came out of that. It felt nice, like we were buying into this camaraderie, and this gang.”
The three musicians have previous credits together, with the two Jamies also writing on The Big Pink’s most recent album, 2022’s ‘The Love That’s Ours’. Fully collaborating on M.O.T.H.E.R., Furze joked, was like “the clash of three egos”. “Everyone wants to work with each other because you like what each other does, and so it’s not quite imposter syndrome but you have to live up to [that idea] and jump in and be a character,” Hince continued. “You can’t be too humble about it.”
Recording between Hince’s studio in LA and Furze’s studio in London’s Bethnal Green, the current trio have also dropped their self-titled debut EP featuring three further tracks: ‘Real Human’, ‘Traitor’, and ‘Surrender’. The ethos of the band, meanwhile, is for the line-up to shift with each release, bringing in familiar faces from other groups and working with whoever might be available at the time.
“We did a little bit [of recording] with Jenny [Lee Lindberg, bassist] from Warpaint who I love; I really want to get something solid down with her,” revealed Hince, while Furze suggested that names including Zach Hill of industrial hip-hop trio Death Grips, and electronic producer Skream have all been in the mix for future iterations of the band.
“We ran into Zach and he seemed into it but then he started ghosting me,” he noted. “Whether or not he decides to text me back, it would be wonderful to have that kind of thing. Jamie Hince, Skream, Rhys Webb from The Horrors [who played on their recent radio session], and Zach – if I saw that, I’d wanna hear what that nonsense sounds like!”
Check out the rest of the interview with Furze and Hince below, as they discuss their endearing bromance, their admiration for Jamie T, and why the band are unlikely to ever make an album.
NME: Hello Robbie and Jamie! You must have been kicking about at a lot of ‘00s parties, how far does your friendship go back?
Robbie Furze: “Me and Jamie T started becoming friends on the circuit of festivals when the first Big Pink record came out in 2009. Then me and Jamie Hince met at Corona Capital in Mexico in 2012.”
Jamie Hince: “He had a reputation – I think we all had reputations… I remember his wife giving me these dried insect snacks and I didn’t eat them because I thought he might have laced them with something…”
Furze: “Every band playing Corona Capital was staying in this massive hotel, so it was just chaos.”
Hince: “It was at the height of ego. Everyone had bodyguards. Bands were trying to outdo other bands. Like, The Black Keys – you’re two guys from Ohio, you don’t need armed bodyguards…”
Where does Jamie T fit into all this?
Hince: “Our orbits crossed quite a bit. I remember seeing him at some tiny little pub when he was probably about 19, and I love how it’s come full circle. My heart sinks a little bit when I see Jamie T working because I know I’m nowhere near [as good as] that. I have to chip away at things and stand back and then dive in again to get the feeling, whereas he’s just got the feeling from the start.”
Furze: “He’s pretty incredible. The song ‘Traitor’ on the EP was supposed to be for my vocal, and he was almost getting pissed off that we couldn’t get the verses right. He was just like, ‘I’ll sort it out’, goes up to the mic, does one take and it’s done. See you later. He’s that kind of guy.”
Do you have to leave your ego at the door in those situations?
Hince: “I did this amazing beat for ‘Traitor’ that I loved, and I sent it to Jamie T and got back a text saying: ‘One pound fish’. Fuck! I mean talk about leaving your ego at the door… I know what he was saying, he thought it was a bit ‘cor blimey’ waltz. But some of the shit he ends up doing, it’s totally ‘cor blimey one pound fish’!”
Furze: “But whatever works for the track works, and everyone has to be happy with it. You push each other without really knowing it.”
How did you envision the project?
Hince: “These things just come together. It sounds cheesy, but I wanted it to be the guitar version of N.E.R.D. – a production team of people that love each other.”
Furze: “We’ve got songs in the pipeline with other artists already, and it makes it like an N.E.R.D. or Unkle or Massive Attack thing. Being collaborative makes me more excited.”
Hince: “It feels like that time has gone where albums really last. Records seem to come and go quite quickly now. So I’ve shifted my enthusiasm because I think the attention span has gone. You spend so much time making records and so little time getting any reward.”
Furze: “I’d like to do standalone singles, or another EP of four or five tracks as a batch. I wouldn’t wanna go further than that.”
None of your individual bands and projects sound that alike – where do you think your tastes align?
Hince: “There’s something unspoken that we all seem to agree on which is this epic-ness. There’s a line in one of the songs that talks about ‘the last of the hooligans‘ and that seemed to be the feeling behind it all. If there’s a similarity with what everyone wanted, it was maybe just being a bit romantic and epic.”
Why do you think you were drawn to that?
Hince: “I don’t know, maybe we’re just lonely men?”
Furze: “Beaten down but being pulled up by hope…”
Hince: “We’ve all been bashing around, making all this noise and spending so much time doing it; I think it gives you that feeling. There’s something tiny and irrelevant about what you do but something life and death about what you do too, and I think the cocktail of that makes it… well, the last of the hooligans.”
Tell us a bit about ‘My Love’ – the first proper single.
Furze: “It’s one of the most basic songs. It’s a love song about hope, but it just has such an incredible energy to it with its simplicity. I’m not a massive Beatles fan but it has this relatable energy [like their early music]. ‘I wanna hold your hand’ – you don’t get more basic than that, in a great way. I think simplicity is power. Sometimes less is more, and if you mean it you can get away with it.”
Are there going to be live shows?
Furze: “Definitely. We’re playing a bit of catch up because we didn’t think ‘My Love’ would get the reaction it has, but we’re desperate to get out and do gigs.”
Hince: “In the spirit of the collaborative project, I’m really liking the idea of having different people in different countries playing with us; having a different vibe each time.”
Furze: “It would be really exciting to see different characters that you know from different bands. For the radio session [with Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music] we had Rhys Webb from The Horrors on bass, and I love that idea.”
You’re obviously very close – what are your favourite memories of this charming bromance?
Furze: “Jamie’s probably my best friend in the world and we’ve been through a lot together. In 2015 we both uprooted and went out to LA together, I went out there for about five years and he stayed, so we were pretty inseparable. It got to a point where it was breakfast, lunch and dinner together.”
Hince: “We just became one person. People would confuse us even though we don’t look the same. He had an ex-girlfriend who he went to say hello to and she said, ‘Hello Jamie’. We just started having the same vibe. The same embarrassing energy. We’ve chilled out a bit recently but when I was in LA and Robbie was in London we’d speak to each other for four hours a day. I was getting complaints from his wife.”
The ‘M.O.T.H.E.R. EP’ is out now.
The Big Pink returned with their third studio album, ‘The Love That’s Ours’, in 2022. It marked their first full-length effort in over 10 years. T and Hince worked on that LP, too, co-writing the single ‘Love Spins On Its Axis’.
The Kills released their sixth and latest record, ‘God Games’, in 2023.
Jamie T, meanwhile, made a comeback with ‘The Theory Of Whatever’ the previous year. He recently joined forces with Fred Again.. on the track ‘Lights Burn Dimmer’, and performed with The Maccabees at their big London reunion gig last summer.
ON THE RISE
Even more than 6,000km away from her hometown of Santurce, Puerto Rico, RaiNao still manages to keep a piece of home with her. It’s Monday morning in Madrid, and the 32-year-old, born Naomi Ramírez Rivera, is calmly sipping on a cup of black coffee surrounded by fan palms and chestnut trees inside the terrace of her hotel. Coffee is her morning ritual back home, and things don’t change even if mere hours ago she was performing in front of 70,000 people as a guest on Bad Bunny’s ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos’ residency in the city.
“I think it was the biggest venue I’ve ever performed at, or maybe it was Brazil,” RaiNao gushes, referring to her February appearance on the tour in São Paulo. Ultimately, the numbers don’t matter; for her, it’s all about the experience. “Even if I had done it 10 times over, it’s always beautiful and a different surprise.”
Music has always been a constant in RaiNao’s life. She began playing the saxophone at 11, but she never thought it would be the way she would make a living. “It’s all Wiso Rivera’s fault,” she says with a laugh. During the pandemic, her then-boyfriend and now creative partner and go-to co-producer encouraged her to go for it. She was stuck in a rut, juggling part-time jobs, when she realised that was not the life she wanted to lead.
“I felt overwhelmed that I thought, ‘Am I really going to spend the rest of my life working inside a bank?’ Wiso told me, ‘We have the tools, the studio is right there. Let’s just do it.’ And we did it.” Her stage name followed naturally. The moniker, a play on her nickname “Nao” with the creolisation of “right now,” is her own carpe diem. “It’s become a mantra for me,” she explains. “I’m in the moment all the time now. It’s a goal and a way of life.”
That now is what has taken RaiNao to global stages, performing ‘PERFuMITO NUEVO’ across the world, on US television, and gaining new listeners along the way. The song is what has put her on the map, and she’s more than grateful to Bad Bunny for the exposure. “He’s an artist who knows what he wants but also gives you your space to create,” she says, adding that their collaboration flowed as smoothly as a hot knife through butter. “I had a lot of freedom, and I’m always going to be thankful for that. I love that type of creative connection; it’s intuitive. We listen to each other. It’s great when anyone connects with your music, but he’s obviously a very important artist for Puerto Rico. Knowing he appreciates my music and my art, and that he says it every time he gets the chance, is incredible.”
She believes it’s precisely this type of interdependent local network that makes the Puerto Rican music scene as special as it is. “The support between artists has been key in careers that blow up,” she says. “We really do rely on each other and uplift each other constantly. It’s beautiful.”
The same way she got the cosign from Bad Bunny, RaiNao is also sharing the spotlight with Puerto Rican talent on her latest project, her second studio album, ‘Marcría’, a play on words that refers to both the PR slang for “spoiled brat” and “sea-raised”. In the 16-track album, RaiNao lends the mic to up-and-coming local musician Frido Vargas, who released his first song, ‘Mareo’, as part of the project.
“I’ll always make space to draw attention to the talent coming from my island, which I know goes hard and deserves as many ears and eyes as I do,” she says. Her debut studio album, ‘Capicú’, followed a similar pattern with the inclusion of Gyanma’s ‘Bajo Candau’.
“I’ll always make space to draw attention to the talent coming from my island, which I know deserves as many ears and eyes as I do”
“Puerto Rico’s indie scene is bustling, and you need to be on the island, soaking it up, to know [local artists],” RaiNao shares. Her label was “sweating” when she proposed including ‘Mareo,’ but when Vargas played the song for her, she knew it belonged in ‘Marcría’.
That’s not to say the project isn’t entirely RaiNao’s. Though it borrows its name from the sea, her ultimate “safe space”, ‘Marcría’ is born from RaiNao’s experience at 10, when her mother enrolled her in a school for the visually impaired. The album is a sensory journey accompanied by guided meditation, colour visualizers, and more to tell the full picture. You’ll notice green is a predominant theme. Emerald is RaiNao’s birthstone and the central piece of a ring she received in sixth grade, when she graduated from said school. As such, the hue has tinged the entire album, manifesting in music videos and in the small orb featured on the cover art.
On YouTube, she has microstories for each song that complement the sensory experience. “Not everyone has seen those, and they form a little story that I wrote based on the sensorial treatments,” she explains. “That came first, and then came the songs. It was an experiment.”
Only two tracks were created before the overarching theme was set: ‘Chamberí’ and the single ‘Gris’, which the artist initially intended to give to someone else. Legendary producer Tainy reached out and asked her to send over a few songs for his repertoire, and RaiNao obliged. “I sent him a few, but I kept going back to ‘Gris’ and thinking it was my song; someone else might like it, but they aren’t going to like it as much as I do.” It wasn’t until she was already structuring the project’s concept that she felt she needed to ask for it back. “I felt no other song exemplified water as much as ‘Gris’ did.”
Another emotional crux on the album is ‘Cántaro’, featuring salsa legend Andy Montañez, one of many remarkable collaborations alongside the likes of Omara Portuondo and Cultura Profética. The song marked the first time RaiNao recorded her own sax in her career. “I know that there are better sax players in Puerto Rico whose sound is way better than mine, and I always tap them to record,” she explains, “but this was a very personal song, and it needed to be me even if the result is not the best.”
The melody for the track was born from a sample of her voice and was later re-envisioned and reworked into a brass comp. Her sax is complemented by a bassoon, played by her best friend, who sent in recordings from Jacksonville, Florida. The result is her take on the “Death of the Author” literary theory and, in a way, her own eulogy. “Once you put out a project, it dies for you,” RaiNao explains, “but with that death comes another birth, another interpretation.”
‘Marcría’ comes to a close with the track that lends it its name, which sees RaiNao reciting a poem by the late Puerto Rican artist Ángelamaría Dávila, included in the 1966 poemario ‘Homenaje al ombligo’. RaiNao serendipitously came across Dávila’s work while working on the album. Upon reading this poem, she was stunned. It perfectly encapsulated the project. “It’s remarkable that this poem was born years ago from the mind of another Puerto Rican woman who’s no longer with us.”
RaiNao toyed with the idea of borrowing from the poem and playing around with vocal layering to use it as an interlude in a song that she’d call ‘Garabato’ (slang for “scribble”). “I wanted something simple that’d bridge the project from its more danceable side to its darker side,” she recalls. Ultimately, she felt the poem, as it was, was the perfect summary, a bio to ‘Marcría’.
Throughout the process of working on this album and the accolades it’s brought her, including a spot in YouTube’s Foundry Class, RaiNao feels “blessed and happy”, but she knows the final word no longer belongs to her; it belongs to the world. “For me, art is very spiritual. I knew I came into this world to leave it a better place with my art,” she says. “I’m always going to try not to dehumanise myself, not to stray too far away from myself to create.”
RaiNao’s ‘Marcría’ is out now via Rimas Entertainment.
