Bicep HHV Records 6 Items

From music blog to DJ sensation

Bicep, the Northern Irish house duo of Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar that is currently turning the British dance scene upside down, wasn’t really a house duo to begin with. In 2008, the two school friends started a blog called Feel My Bicep – because while scouring local record stores, they found a pile of obscure and forgotten electronic treasures that they wanted to share with the world. Soon they found an online fanbase for it, which grew rapidly to 100,000 monthly readers: “The more we posted, the more people would come,” the two said of their new “addictive” hobby. Eventually, they moved from Belfast to London to launch their DJ career in the capital’s nightclubs and release some first vinyls: with the deep house-inspired 12" Darwin on the Throne on Blood label, they made waves in the scene in 2010, and their single 313 got them their first international DJ gigs. They made a name for themselves with their remixes of scene-renowned house acts and DJ‘d monthly at London’s legendary Plastic People nightclub. Subsequently, they founded their own label, which was given the same name as their blog. In 2012, the duo released the 12" Vision of Love, which soon became a hit in the club scene.

From the nightclubs to the concert halls

The prestigious British DJ Mag gave Bicep the award for Best Breakthrough DJ in the same year, and with tracks like Satisfy , D-Mil and Just – the latter awarded Track of the Year 2015 by the same magazine – they made the leap into the pool of live concerts outside the nightclubs. Where the creative duo tended more towards breakbeat , they drew the crowds to them: their hotly anticipated self-titled debut album was released in 2017 on the Ninja Tune label and made it smoothly into the Top 20 in the U.K. The fact that it took so long to create was explained by Bicep with composure: “We need to spend half a day on a song, on eight or nine different [occasions], over a long period. You don’t want to end up associating a track with a time you were pissed off or hungover.” For Ferguson and McBriar are convincing not only on EP vinyls for the clubs, but just as much on album length: the mixture of nostalgic house, hip hop breakbeats and psychedelic-tinged samples awakened even the biggest music magazines like Pitchfork and the Guardian, Mixmag simply called the record a classic. Tracks like Glue generated a hype online, sending Bicep’s streaming numbers into the millions.

A club record while the clubs are closed

On an international headlining tour, they transformed their live shows the following year into excessive light spectacles, bringing together diverse niches of house fans. In addition, the Four-Tet remix of their track Opal went viral, and in 2018 Bicep delivered Rain , a new EP on which they tried their hand at a sample by Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar . A string of singles was followed by a club record in 2021 with their second long-player Isles , while clubs around the world were closed due to Covid – but the pair was not discouraged: they now simply played via livestream and subsequently received widespread press praise for the virtual shows. Their new record celebrated the cultural differences of their London residency – inspired by Bollywood records or Turkish pop music, for example. And also they saw the album as a conclusion of a special era of electronic music. In the UK, they reached number two in the charts with the record, celebrating their biggest success to date, and in the same year they were nominated for two BRIT Awards. As headliners they played at London’s Field Day Festival, and in 2022 the house duo finally delivered innovative single follow-ups with Meli (II) and Water .