Following on from the 2020 album All Function One, BirdPen return with their 7th studio album – Think Of Nice Things.
Written in the heart of The New Forest, England, Dave Pen & Mike Bird merge kraut rock driven beats, with twisted psychedelic guitars and rolling bass lines, cloaked in thought out melancholia and poignant lyrics to make their own doom groove driving sound that always takes the listener on a journey into the sonic unknown.
Having worked together for years with BirdPen and Archive, Bird & Pen have never been short on ideas, and they wrote Think Of Nice Things from scratch in just ten days. This time around they wanted to enter the writing space with no previous ideas and see what would happen after taking some time out following the pandemic and the delayed release and tour of their last album All Function One.
Pen says – I think writing our previous album, All Function One, about isolation and being trapped inside just as the pandemic hit was a mad concept we didn’t actually think would come true. Then touring it in a post-pandemic world felt kind of strange, so I think we needed a break from the BirdPen world we’d created over so many years. We honestly didn’t know if, when we got together again after 4 years, just the two of us with no songs or ideas, it would really work, but it did, and within 10 days we had 14 brand new songs.
With Think Of Nice Things, we wrote straight off the cuff, with ideas about how our world is changing so quickly and the continued uncertainty of what our so-called World leaders will do to us all, alongside AI and conflict; the words just flooded out in a kind of subconscious stream. We just went with the feeling of what was literally coming out as we were writing the music, and it was very cathartic for us. Another interesting fact about this album is the track order; the songs were written in the order they appear on the album.
We then headed to Stockholm to finish the album and recorded with some Swedish musicians, added real strings, pianos and drums, plus some cool old synthesizers.
This album feels freer and more energetic than our previous work, and with the title, Think Of Nice Things, I think it’s some sort of mantra or calming technique we all need. When you look around the modern world, it can be a proper slog of hatred, scaremongering, anxiety and misinformation, so the album and titles are our way of escaping.
The new album was recorded and produced by both Mike Bird & Dave Pen at Old Oak, UK, and Paalsund, Sweden, and was mixed & mastered by Fredrik Okazaki.
The album is due out in Spring 2027 and will be accompanied by a European Tour.
Think Of Nice Things - track list:
Fear Of Fear
Enough
Good History
Send Me To Earth As A Bird
How Did We Do
Accept
Body Armour
Wake Up
Slip Away
Thank You For Nothing
It’s In Your Head
Blood
Credits
