Bicep has shared their first new single “Water” featuring vocalist Clara La San. The track is the first since the release of their album Isles.

The release also contains the b-side “Waterfall”, an earlier, instrumental version of “Water” which gives fans a chance to gain an insight into how the ideas for the finished track have developed over time. This is an ethos that has carried through all of Bicep’s recent work, their last album ‘Isles’ was always intended to be fluid, with the tracks in their recorded form evolving and mutating for the live shows and beyond, as seen with the recent release of “Meli (II)”, originally a beatless track on their ‘Isles Deluxe’ release.

Describing the process of how both tracks came into being, the duo explains that “Water” was solely intended to be a standalone thing, essentially developed for the live show to cater for a specific moment in the set. “There was no outright idea when we started, but the original “Waterfall” was born out of experimentation with an instrument called the MEGAfm. It’s a new synth but has chips inside which formed the sounds of the SEGA Megadrive/Genesis games consoles. Weirdly it got more computer game sounding when we developed it into “Water”, speeding up and slowing down the lead line and LFOs to give that classic low-bit sound effect.”

“We always like to be fluid with ideas and never stick to one direction, when we play live we develop tracks and constantly tweak and change elements and like to employ that process in the studio too. We work with Clara a lot and even from the early “Waterfall” demos we had vocal sounding pads in there which we had in mind for her to sing along with. Both “Water” and “Waterfall” have the same spine, but have two totally different directions in terms of how they finished up. It’s a common thing in the studio to start on one demo and go in different directions but end up liking both and not knowing which to choose.”

“We like both directions and think some people will like one over the other. When we ran the blog from time to time we would find original demos of famous songs released in the past and ended up preferring those. Sometimes the rawness in the original idea is nice to hear and can end up being appreciated in a totally different way.”

Bicep play one of their biggest UK shows to date with back-to-back performances at London’s 10k capacity Alexandra Palace on 2nd and 3rd of December 2022, and a headline arena tour throughout Europe this Autumn including Zenith Paris, Lotto Arena Antwerp and UFO Velodrom Berlin, and a run of high-profile festival and headline shows across Australia in the new year including stops in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

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