Soft Play capped off a triumphant 2024 as they wrapped up their UK tour with a dazzling Halloween show at London’s Brixton Academy last week. The duo, formerly known as Slaves, have nothing in the diary now until the new year but there’s a lot to look back and reflect on in the meantime, their name change and debut album as Soft Play - Heavy Jelly came out earlier this year - bringing some of their biggest success yet.
Speaking to this writer around the release of Heavy Jelly, guitarist Laurie Vincent said they came into Soft Play determined to do things their way having learned lessons the hard way in their previous incarnation. “I don’t know if this was just in my head back then, but it felt like we were being told, ‘If you go down this route, you’re going to be an indie band’ and ‘If you go down this route, you’re going to be a rock band’, and you have to pick your lane. It was never given to us, ‘Just do it all’, there was this fear that if you did this thing, you won’t get that thing. It was the same with publications. ‘If you give this person an exclusive, they won’t give you one’ or ‘If you go to this radio station first...’ This time, it’s just been like, ‘Fuck it’.”
The release of the first Soft Play single Punk’s Dead back in 2023, Vincent explained, taught the pair that they needed to embrace the heavier side of their music where they’d previously been wary of alienating certain parts of their fanbase. “I feel like when we got signed to a major label, we had a big management company behind us, all that stuff, and it was like ‘You’re really big, or you’re getting there off your own back, how can we make you bigger?’. I think people loved the fact we were really heavy and we were really silly. Then we accidentally fell into this thinking that it’s got to be more palatable, it’s got to be more indie to get to the next level,” he recalled. “We put Punk’s Dead out thinking it wasn’t gonna even be a single. It was like, ‘Oh, no, people want the music to be really fucking heavy’. That song lit the fuse to direct us towards a super heavy, really uncompromising record where it goes as silly, as heavy, as deep as we’ve ever done. And I think without Punk’s Dead starting that we wouldn’t have got there.”
It's an approach that has certainly paid off for the two-piece. Watch the video for Punk’s Dead below:
