The Big Moon – Forever

Four years on from last LP Here Is Everything – and a further eight since frontwoman Juliette Jackson first laid the foundations for the band – the London-formed four-piece find themselves in a very different, if similarly challenging, headspace. Where that record was conceived in the context of COVID and found Jackson processing the life-altering experience of new motherhood, Forever examines what’s left when you’ve already checked off many of the major milestones, and is tempered by a first-hand understanding of life’s fragility.

The truth is, the past couple of years have been a big readjustment for Jackson. In 2024, she was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma – a benign but destructive cyst inside the eardrum which has to be removed with surgery. Jackson explains, “I permanently lost most of the hearing on one side, which was pretty much existential, because writing songs is my job and my identity.”

Stoic by nature, Jackson forged forward with songwriting regardless but found herself faltering. “I couldn't hear properly, everything sounded out of tune and I was just struggling to find a point at all, just writing these miserable songs I couldn't really hear.” The answer was to shift her outlook completely, manifesting “a happy ending that didn’t exist yet.”

“I just decided to write songs for this imaginary time, one or two years in the future, when I would be all healed and happy again. I didn’t know if I would ever get to that point but, by projecting and almost tricking myself into it, it actually became a really nice way of writing.”

Naturally, for a friendship group as famously tight-knit as The Big Moon, it was a hugely worrying time. Drummer Fern Ford recalls that “Jules was very brave” and guitarist Soph Nathan agrees: “I remember asking Jules about it, but thinking maybe I shouldn't because internalising it and carrying on is her way of coping.” Bassist/keyboardist Celia Archer adds, “We all just hoped along with her, sort of yes-and-ing that reality, while simultaneously being there for her, just in case.”

It proved an extremely fruitful approach, producing some of the brightest songs of The Big Moon’s career to date. Recorded over three weeks at Norfolk’s Bam Bam Studios, with Kevin Morby-collaborator Sam Cohen co-producing alongside the band, Forever is brimming with hook-heavy alt-pop gems, not least because Jackson had fallen out of love with writing verses. “Over the years I've got more impatient with music,” Jackson explains with a grin. “I just like getting straight to the point.”

You can hear that directness in the hazy psych-pop of ‘Three Things’ – the feather-light lilt of its stacked vocal harmonies leading to a euphoric, reverb-drenched chorus – or in the synth-flecked shimmer of ‘Speed Bump’, which sets a story of perseverance to an undulating melody that echoes its namesake. With ‘Fun’, Jackson was attempting to write her version of Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davies Eyes’, producing a suitably dramatic, groove-driven epic, featuring the fantastic refrain, “Fun is as complex as misery.”

“[The song] is a retaliation against feeling miserable,” she explains. “And it’s also a retaliation against the idea that for art to be taken seriously, it has to be really dark and serious. Because joy and fun is just as real and authentic as pain.”

The swinging guitar groove of ‘F.O.R.E.V.E.R.’ is similarly validating, culminating with the reassurance, “When you’re feeling small like nothing you do could make a change / I’m here being moved by every single breath you take.” Meanwhile the truly glorious guitar-pop of ‘You Remind Me That I’m Dying (and that it’s good to be alive)’ is a carpe diem anthem for the ages with a chorus so huge you can practically hear it from space.

For all that Forever is testament to the power of positive thinking, it isn’t without its darkness. A throwback from Jackson’s early songwriting sessions, the pared-back acoustic-pop of ‘Sounds’ sees her dealing with her diagnosis in devastating fashion, recalling, “Sounds like the pen tapping the skin / Of the doctor’s knuckles, waiting / For you to stop crying.”

The underlying heaviness of the subject matter ultimately inspired the album’s arrangements, as Archer explains. “Rather than an overstuffed pop sound, we wanted a cleaner, sleeker sound to leave space for Jules' feelings. A song like ‘Gravity’ feels like it has this cavernous, echoing space to it.” Equally, the sophistication and variety of Forever is the natural byproduct of a band who continue to grow as musicians via a range of side-projects, be that Nathan’s output in Our Girl or Ford’s recent solo material.

For a band who’ve already hit all manner of career milestones – from playing arenas with Glass Animals to receiving a Mercury Prize nod – their proudest achievement remains their continued friendship. As Archer puts it, “I don't think you can do the job at the level that we do it for as long as we have without a huge level of respect and care and communication.”

A song like ‘Gravity’ proves they’re still charting new creative territory too. A spacey slow-burn built around a snaking funk groove, it’s the product of one of Jackson’s more intriguing songwriting experiments. “I decided to try and write a Disney princess song,” she laughs. “I'd been watching a lot of Frozen because I had a three year old at the time, so I wanted to write something really epic and broad with loads of key changes. I wrote it while watching Elsa singing ‘Let It Go’ on mute.”

Having been pregnant with her second child during the writing of the album, Jackson draws on her domestic experiences on ‘Chill’, elevating the mundanity and hypervigilance of parenting into something truly sublime. Indeed, post-illness, she’s more determined than ever to treat the everyday with the same reverence as life’s big, dramatic experiences, because both are equally valid.

As Archer explains, they hope the album proves uplifting. “They're not trivial songs lyrically or thematically or musically, but Jules has shown us you can face all this stuff and choose to be hopeful and find power from it. Hopefully other people can apply that to their own lives.” For, as Forever illustrates so beautifully, again and again, happily ever after isn’t something that falls in your lap – it’s something you work at.