FEATURE:
Spotlight
Good Neighbours
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I realise I focus…
largely on solo artists when it comes to my Spotlight features. This time around, I am talking about Good Neighbours. There is a lot out there, and I am going to drop quite a few interviews in. The first I want to come to is from 1883 Magazine. They discussed their debut E.P., Good Neighbours:
“Before coming together as Good Neighbours, Oli Fox and Scott Verrill were carving their own paths as solo artists. Their individual experiences shaped the foundation of what would become their unique collaboration, a project defined by creative freedom and a fresh approach to making music. Unlike their previous ventures, where external voices often clouded their artistic vision, Good Neighbours is a space where the duo can fully express themselves, free from outside influence. The result is a raw, unfiltered sound that stands in stark contrast to their earlier work.
From the moment they sent out their first SoundCloud link—intended as a joke—major labels were quick to notice. What started as a playful move turned into a surreal moment, with industry insiders reaching out within hours. Their breakout single “Home” soon went viral on TikTok, catapulting the band into the spotlight. Despite the sudden success, they’ve stayed true to their DIY roots, recording with whatever tools are available—whether that’s an iPhone or a high-end studio mic—infusing their tracks with an authentic, handmade quality that resonates with listeners.
Before Good Neighbours, both of you had solo careers. How did your experiences as individual artists shape what you bring to this project, and what makes Good Neighbours different from your previous ventures?
This is definitely the first time we’ve both made something with no external input whatsoever – we both had really similar paths in our solo projects and got to the point where there were way too many cooks in the kitchen and we lost our vision.
To be honest the best thing about this time round was the fact we had no intention to even start the band and it’s all been centered around the music.
You sent out your first email with a SoundCloud link as a bit of a joke, and within hours, major labels were reaching out. What was going through your minds at that moment? Did it feel like a surreal moment?
Yeah it was super gratifying for people to react so passionately purely from hearing the music. We found a couple emails from LinkedIn for our favourite labels and sent an obnoxious email with the songs. People in the music industry LOVE to know about things before anyone else, so it was just a fun bit for us to disguise it as this totally new project when actually we had crossed paths with most of these people before… people couldn’t figure out if we were like 16 or 40.
Your song “Home” blew up on TikTok and became a massive viral hit. How did you handle the pressure that came with that sudden success, and how did it impact the way you approached creating music afterward?
Luckily we weren’t making music with any goal in mind and first, we were just writing for the sake of fun and trying to be a bit naive again, so before we had even begun writing Home there were a string of songs we made that all felt super cohesive. For us home is like an anomaly that’s helped to kick everything off – we don’t want to force stuff to fit with it and are just trying to stick to writing whatever feels new and fresh.
The DIY approach you’ve taken with the EP is refreshing. Can you share some of the unconventional methods you used to record tracks, like recording drum parts through iPhones, and how this adds to your overall sound?
The whole recording process for us is like bottling up the energy and excitement as fast as we can, instead of thinking about it technically. So we just record with whatever is within an arm’s reach – most of the time it’s our phone and we airdrop parts in, or if we’re in a room with a big fancy mic we’ll use it just cos it’s what’s available. I think you can definitely hear that there are two humans hitting stuff and shouting in a small room in most of our songs, which is cool.
You describe your sound as capturing the ‘coming of age’ feeling. How do you go about creating that emotion in your music, and how do your personal experiences play into the songwriting?
Staying completely honest and raw in the lyrics gives our songs a nice edge to them. We love mirroring this in our recording process by not over thinking anything and being quite brash and fast with how we work.
It’s been a big year for Good Neighbours, with your EP release and performing on major stages. What has been the most rewarding or surreal moment of this journey so far?
It’s all moved so insanely fast that it’s hard to soak it in – we’re working on that… I think because we slogged away in our previous projects for so long, everything this time round feels like a win and we are way more grateful for it. Some of the festival stages like the Radio One Tent at Reading have been the most surreal because those are the ones we dreamed of playing as teenagers.
Your music has a nostalgic, bittersweet vibe with a touch of darkness in the lyrics despite the uplifting choruses. How do you balance these contrasting emotions in your songwriting?
The blue sky mentality. It’s been a motto of ours when writing. I think it’s stemmed from our hometowns, that aren’t the most beautiful places to look at but when the sun is out it’s a wonderful place to be. So we try and treat the subject matter like that; taking any topics like depression or anxiety and putting them in an uplifting production that kinda opens the conversation up to the audience.
Looking back at your early days in the industry and the challenges you faced, what lessons did you take from those experiences that guide you now with Good Neighbours?
When we first started out in the industry I think it was easier and safer to say yes to others opinions because we thought they knew best. With this project, it’s been us and only us from day one. So we’ve been free of opinions in the creative process which I think has really benefited us and I believe that’s why people are truly buying into the message the project is putting out”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Swann
I am going to take a snippet of an interview DIY published with Good Neighbours from last August. This breakthrough duo who are creating perfect summer Indie bangers, I think that they are going to festival mainstays pretty soon. Designed to get large crowds united and jumping:
“Although, from the outside, it might seem like Good Neighbours have come out of nowhere, the pair explain they’d been toiling as solo artists for years before their pathways finally crossed. Verrill muses: “We spent so long in our previous musical lives working away, now we feel like we deserve these big moments and we’re able to take it in our stride a little bit more.”
With that in mind, it doesn’t necessarily feel like they’re short-circuiting the system in heading straight for the bigger stages. “I don’t think either of us were really loving playing alone,” Fox says, looking back. “We both grew up playing in bands. I personally fell out of love with it massively, I didn’t know what music I wanted to make so I just took a step back and became a songwriter just because it meant a bit more creative freedom.”
After the bulk of their workload became Zoom sessions with artists overseas, the duo suddenly realised they had this time to burn themselves. “The whole project was born out of this spare energy that was always sitting between us that we’d never used,” explains Verrill. But those hard yards of working together resulted in a natural chemistry. “Those couple of years were really helpful. We both dabble on all instruments so we just jump in and out of each other’s places and it’s really fluid.”
Given the project was born from a place of fun and freedom, the band plan on keeping it that way, even as the pressures from their fans and the industry begin to grow. “Ultimately we started this project for us as a writing exercise and that’s where all the joy came from,” says Fox. “I don’t think that spark should ever go; as long as we keep the blinkers on in the best way possible then the magic will continue.”
Having largely processed their overnight rise via screen-based metrics and numbers so far, now the pair are relishing the thought of a packed festival season including milestone performances at Reading and Leeds. “Just playing on an outdoor stage feels so right for the music,” says Verrill. Fox nods: “Everyone’s takeaway from the shows we’ve done is that it should be on a bigger stage. It’s heartening to hear that because we want to be that festival band that lifts everyone up.”
Taking stock of their whirlwind six months, the band are trying to take it one day at a time. “We had no plans for the band, we just had a bunch of songs that we loved,” says Fox. “We didn’t have any expectations so we do feel blindsided in the best way possible.” Verrill says they’re thankful to have each other through such a dizzying time: “You celebrate all of the wins together, it feels like the perfect chemistry. Nothing has been overthought, we’re just making it up as we go which is better for our heads not to jump too far ahead; we’re just letting it happen and setting our own benchmarks. Right now, everything is this beautiful happy accident that just keeps working. Let’s just hope that continues and then we’ll be two very happy boys”.
Four more interviews I want to highlight. I will start with one from Rolling Stone from November. They chatted about the concept of guilty pleasures and why they want to feel like teenagers when writing and creating their music. I am new to their music but am really interested to see where they go next.
“When you first came together to make music, what drew you in the direction of this bright, melodic indie sound?
Oli: It was just personal taste really.
Scott: We never really liked the pop stuff we were making that much, and no-one references the indie 2000s scene. We’d never delved into it together and realised we have all these mutual bands [that we like].
Oli: It was like a guilty pleasure making it.
Scott: We were desperate to make something fun, and that you felt like a teenager when you were making it.
Guilty pleasures are an interesting concept – it’s only guilty if you allow yourself to feel that it is. Pop-punk is massively in vogue again now thanks to Olivia Rodrigo…
Oli: It’s a bit of a risk, but when we started making it, the whole thing felt like fate. When we started to feel like this could be a band, all the deep cuts of Foster the People were started circulating again online. Kids were finding them for the first time. That was the universe screaming at us and saying, ‘You are the ones that need to bring it to the forefront and really do it’. That really motivated us.
Does your recent debut EP serve as a chronological run through the start of the band?
Oli: It’s kind of chronological. We went on a purple patch of ‘Keep It Up’, ‘Daisies’, ‘Ripple’. ‘Home’ was the last song we wrote for the EP. We had the chorus for ages and never really thought much of it to be honest. Then we put [the teaser] out and it popped off, so we realised we needed to finish it straight away. ‘Home’ was the keys going in the engine and wanting to shout our name as loudly as possible. When ‘Keep It Up’ came out, that’s when we could actually show what we’re about.
Does the music you’ve been writing since the EP follow a similar sonic path, or are you looking to experiment beyond that?
Scott: We’re trying to experiment a little bit more. We definitely had a formula with the earlier music, which I guess was easy to write. We’re trying to push ourselves a little bit more. It’s a little bit more electronic.
Oli: When you’re playing gigs, you start to see gaps in your discography. As performers, we know where we want the gig to go, but realise that we haven’t even written that song yet. It’s such a good practice of knowing BPMs that we’re missing out, or the feel of a song that we haven’t got yet.
People have been sending us loads of 2000s bands that we remind them of, and we’ve been listening to them and taking a lot of inspiration from that. It’s evolving in front of our eyes. We’re excited to show people.
Scott: We’re trying to keep the naivety that we had before, just making stuff on our laptops between the two of us and trying to keep it janky.
The lyrics of Good Neighbours are very personal – was it nice to be able to write from that place after years of writing for others?
Oli: The weirdest thing as a songwriter is having a message that you know you want to say, but you feel bad inflicting it onto another artist. Or there’s a real nugget that they could have, but they just can’t relate to it. That was a bit of a struggle for me as a writer, and I always wondered why that was. I guess this band pointed out that maybe I’d needed to just say it as the artist.
That’s been a real help for me, personally and mentally, to have a space to talk about struggle and then see it react on a big scale with people around the world. It’s been a real acceptance of stuff that I’ve been dealing with personally, which has been a really lovely part of the project. When people come up to you after the gig and tell you that you’ve helped them through a really hard time, you hear about that happening with other artists, but when it happens to you for the first time, you’re like, ‘Oh shit, I can actually make a difference, or lighten someone else’s load”.
Even though Chappell Roan won the BBC Sound of 2025 poll, you think it should have gone to an act like Good Neighbours. Less well-known than her, it would have been more appropriate, though they were named among the longlist. NME spoke with the rising duo. They highlighted how they want to be ‘that’ festival band:
“Are the lyrics to ‘Home’ autobiographical?
Fox: “A little. The chorus came to me at a time when I’d returned home for a funeral in Essex for a few days and I was feeling awful about home as a location. When I returned to London, I hugged my then-girlfriend and my whole body just relaxed. I had this visceral sensation and there was this feeling that maybe home is not simply a place; it can be a person too. That became the sentiment of the song.”
Social media has played a huge role in your breakthrough. How do you feel about it?
Verrill: “When we started, we weren’t even sure if Good Neighbours was going to be a proper project, so we certainly weren’t sure we were going to do [social media], but everyone was telling us to use it. In the end, we stuck ‘Home’ up at the last minute to see what would happen.”
Fox: “I think we’ve realised that some things are meant to do really well on social media. That also means that other things don’t quite work and it’s not always obvious why. That’s why I believe live music is undefeated. There’s a fizz in the air when you’re in a venue that you can’t necessarily translate through two speakers at the bottom of a phone.”
Where does the name Good Neighbours come from?
Verrill: “It was originally just a joke.”
Fox: “Yeah. The name came from the fact we were nextdoor neighbours in the studio. Because Scott and I have had projects before, we wanted to test the industry a little bit, so we sent our demos out under the name ‘Good Neighbours’.”
Verrill: :And it was a really obnoxious email as well!”
Fox: “Yeah. The subject heading was ‘You should listen to this’ accompanied by a SoundCloud link. That was all it said. But it sparked a bit of interest that day and we quickly realised that something was happening – more than we ever imagined it would.”
Verrill: “It was a cold email as well. It wasn’t through any of our industry links.”
Did that make you more nonchalant with your approach than you’d usually be?
Fox: “Definitely. Both of us have experienced this industry in the past. You become attuned to thinking, ‘I’ve had my shot now’. Labels talk about it a lot within meetings. They say, ‘You did well, but it didn’t quite click’. I think we both had a ‘fuck it’ mentality going into Good Neighbours, thinking that if they don’t know it’s us we’ll just see if they say anything. When they all replied, it was as though our band pseudonym worked!”
Where are you guys at with your debut album?
Verrill: “We’re just finishing our album at the moment. We’re set to release that in April next year.”
Fox: “We’re trying to figure the album out. I don’t think we’re currently tied to any sort of running order. We’ve got a lot of songs, so it’s a case of whittling it down. We want our album to establish this world we’re building: one of big, blue-sky energy; something that people want to see live. We want to be that festival band”.
Prior to getting to an interview from January, I am going to come to one from Wonderland. from later last year. This amazing and hungry duo are primed for big things. Good Neighbours are already making such an impact. Do make sure that you follow their progress:
“You’ve both had journeys in the industry prior to Good Neighbours. Talk us through them? What did you learn?
I think it’s taught both of us a lot. We maybe listened to one too many opinions last time round, and both ended up with projects we didn’t love. Where as this time we kep the whole project a secret until we truly truly loved it. It’s really help us standout from the rest I think.
What do you think it is about your debut single “Home” that connected so widely with listeners?
I think the song came at a time when people needed to hear that? Home is a title that’s been done to death, but after a festive period with loved ones and in the uncertainty of the new year, I think maybe everyone was a little tender and missing their roots. I guess we opened up the conversation to that online with our tik toks, and people wanted to talk?
Congratulations on your debut EP! How are you feeling about the release?
Really excited for it to be out there. We’d love to say “glad it’s finally out” but it’s hardly been anytime at all since we finished it. I really think it’s a great representation of us and what we want people to get from the Good Neighbours world.
Talk us through the process of creating the body of work? Was it smooth sailing? What were the challenges?
It was frustratingly easy, we had a real flukey run of writing whilst we were in December and January, Writing “Keep It Up”, “Daisies” and “Weekend Boy” in back-to-back sessions. “Bloom” and “Home” were added late to the EP when we wrote them in January and they truly elevate the whole thing.
What topics do you cover across the EP?
The whole EP was written in as honest fashion as possible, we cover our lives in London. From the ups and downs of jobs we hate working in order to make rent, to the people we’ve loved and the people we’ve lost. It’s a mixed bag of truth, and we’re really happy that people have resonated with everything so far.
What do you hope the work achieves?
I think we honestly just hope people hear it and want to see it come to life on stage. We wanna play even more gigs in 2025 and really bring the neighbourhood into fruition.
What’s to come next? This year, and beyond?
Who knows, we’re trying to stay a little starry-eyed and take everything as it comes. Maybe a track will come out of the blue, maybe it wont haha. Our main focus is gonna be nailing a couple more tracks for our album and playing some very fun tours!
To you, what does success look like?
Success was never in our minds when we started good neighbours, the goal was to write some songs in our little studio and maybe play a couple of gigs to our mates. So in terms of a shiny golden success trophy I don’t think we know what that looks like, so we will just get our heads down and work work work, so that in a few years time we can look back and be pleasantly surprised”.
I am ending on an interview from DORK. Included in their Hype List 2025, they celebrated a duo who are crafting Indie smashes that aim to unite a generation looking for connection. It is interesting knowing more about Good Neighbours:
“Home’ was properly released in January 2024 and was followed by ‘Keep It Up’ in April. The five-track riot of ‘Good Neighbours’ dropped in October after a whole lot of live shows. “We were worried about being tied down as a TikTok band, so we’ve been trying to do as many gigs as humanly possible,” says Scott. “We want to showcase the whole character of the band.”
Their nostalgic indie-pop sounds like a sunny day, but there’s a darker edge to it. “Scott’s production is always blue sky vibes so it’s been nice to weigh that down with lyrics that talk about things like grief. It’s so cathartic to sing these big, expressive songs that mean so much to us,” says Oli, taking inspiration from tracks like Bleachers’ hopeful anthem ‘Better’.
“We didn’t talk about it when we first started but the message of Good Neighbours has become really clear over the past few months. We both grew up in small towns where it felt taboo to talk about your emotions, so hopefully being really heart on the sleeve with the lyrics can start conversations.” The fact the music is so energetic, joyful and huge makes it easier as well. “There’s something powerful about songs people can wail to, if they need it,” says Oli. “Our shows really have become this release for people.”
Good Neighbours are trying not to get carried away, though. “We don’t really talk about the future because we don’t want to overthink it,” says Scott. “We’re just taking things week by week.”
“We’ve seen plenty of bands come and go within the year, so longevity is the main goal,” says Oli, though playing Glastonbury, a headline show at Brixton Academy, and a summer spent playing festivals are all up there. “I think we’re way bigger than we currently are, in terms of aspirations and the way things could go for us. We’re not tied to a single genre either, so there’s a lot of different directions we can move in, which is fun.”
“The message of Good Neighbours has become really clear over the past few months”
And their next move is a debut album. They’ve already been testing a lot of new music at live shows, and Good Neighbours are planning on getting the record out by summer.
“The blueprint is the same, but there are definitely some new vibes,” says Oli, teasing a more experimental album that takes influence from overlooked 00s bands like Animal Collective and The Go Team. “I forgot how abstract some of that music was. We’ve been noticing the pockets of our shows where people could be moving a bit more as well. There’s just no better feeling than seeing a whole room moving as one, so I think it’ll be quite a beat-led record.”
Releasing music as Good Neighbours never felt scary before. “There’s fear now we’ve had some success, though,” admits Oli. “Before, when things didn’t work out, it was easy to take because it felt like I was wasting that opportunity anyway. I’ve never had things go this well before and you just really want to hold on to that feeling,” he adds. “I guess we just have to trust that people connected to the music because it was us having fun. If we keep doing that, everything should be golden”.
A duo with incredible chemistry and sensational music, if you are not aware of Good Neighbours yet then make sure that you connect with them. I love what they are putting out into the world. These good friends are putting out into the world…
GOOD vibes.
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