O.: Weird Science

Uncategorisable, open-minded and, yes, a little bit loopy, O. are the Speedy Wunderground affiliates turning wrong turns into an art form

“Sorry if it’s a bit sweaty in here!” says Joe Henwood, one half of the duo O., as he welcomes me into their south London studio. It’s surprisingly tiny, even for a duo. With instruments and amps lining each wall, it feels more like a storage cupboard than a rehearsal space. To get to a seat at the far end, I have to squeeze past drummer Tash Keary’s kit and clamber over a board of pedals wired up to Henwood’s baritone saxophone. “Don’t worry, those are made to be stepped on,” he laughs.

Scattered across one of the drum skins is a pile of small letters made out of cereal – the remnants of a DIY social media video they’ve been working on as part of the campaign for their new album, WeirdOs. It’s the latest in a string of silly, pastel-coloured, and food-based promo material (the image plugging last year’s Slice EP revolved around cake). “Our music sounds quite dark and serious, but it’s all done in this kind of playful, childish way,” says Henwood, who is wearing a bleached baby blue T-shirt with painted nails to match. Keary, perched on the drum stool next to him, laughs shyly as she sips a milkshake. 

Dark, playful, serious, childish – it’s a neat summary of the tensions that lie at the heart of the band. Although they make relentless, abrasive noise that sits somewhere between mutant jazz, rock and metal, their sound is underpinned by an endearing commitment to messing around. Songs are born from hours of not-so-serious improvising, riffing off music they liked as teenagers and recording offbeat covers. Just a week earlier, they shared a frenzied instrumental take on Espresso, the global smash hit by gen Z pop princess Sabrina Carpenter. “I think to do [songwriting] really well, you wanna be in the kind of headspace you’re in when you’re a kid,” Henwood adds. “It’s about no inhibitions and having fun.”

Keary and Henwood, from Leicester and Oxford respectively, met in late 2019 after they were both recruited for a mutual friend’s band. They’d only played around three shows together but when Covid hit early the following year, they decided to form a bubble. Keary set up a drum kit in her room and the pair would jam together for hours each day, playing along to songs they loved, spanning dub, hip-hop, metal and electronic – all genres that are still traceable in their music. “We had literally nothing else to do,” Keary says with a self-pitying laugh. “We’d just jam and eat food.” Their first official performance together took the form of a socially distanced livestream – something they now see as corny, and which pissed off their neighbours at the time. “Like 20 minutes in, they were texting us, freaking out,” Henwood says, mock mortified. “Apparently they’d just sat down to watch Eurovision.” As lockdown eased, they began renting their current studio, part of a bigger space that’s also home to artists like caroline, Deep Tan and PVA. The move empowered them to play even louder and harder. “If you wanna be in a band, whatever style of music it is, there’s no way of cheating, of skipping the playing-with-each-other-loads part,” Henwood says. “We played so much then, and we’ve kept it up. We come here three days a week and we play all the time.”

Although their initial intentions were to jam rather than start a band, the formula made sense and the pairing stuck. “We have a really similar approach to how we listen to music, talk about music, how we wanna express ourselves. I think we have similar tastes, but also different tastes. We introduced each other to a lot of different things,” Henwood says, before Keary chimes in. “If lockdown hadn’t happened, I think we still would’ve been a band but it would’ve taken, like, five years for us to think about it, and then it would’ve taken who knows how many years on top of that to write the songs. I think it just helped us speed everything up.”

Armed with their first batch of songs, the duo’s first few gigs in front of a real audience were support slots at beloved Brixton venue The Windmill, where acts including Goat Girl, Jockstrap and Black Country, New Road took their own first steps. It’s here they were spotted by Dan Carey, founder of indie label Speedy Wunderground and the producer behind black midi. Within a few months, they were signed by Carey and touring with black midi across the UK and Europe. The experience was formative for them. “Seeing black midi – who make incredibly weird music – sell out these fucking giant venues and seeing their audiences go absolutely nuts for them was huge to me. I’ve not seen audiences act like that to anything that isn’t pop or Queens of the Stone Age,” says Keary, wide-eyed. “It was just the most validating thing for our band, like: Oh, we can make really weird music but still connect with people.”

Before O., Keary and Henwood had only ever played in bands much bigger in number. Keary was a member of Tomorrow’s Warriors Female Frontline collective, while Henwood played with the nine-piece Afro-jazz outfit, Nubiyan Twist. Drastically scaling down the rhythm section to just baritone saxophone and drums was scary at first. “We both found it intimidating,” Keary says, candidly. “As a drummer, I’m usually at the back, and as quite a short person, I normally can’t see the crowd at all. Usually if I miss a snare drum when I’m playing a groove, it doesn’t matter because there’s a horn section or a singer in front of me. When we play as a duo, we’re right at the  front of the stage and, musically, we’re both quite exposed. There’s nothing to hide behind!”

But the challenge of creating such a full sound with just two people was a welcome one, and they remain determined to push their instruments beyond their prescribed functions in order to make as much noise as possible. There are several moments on WeirdOs that could be mistaken for shredding guitars, like on Green Shirt, which stutters and grinds menacingly, or on the swampy, slow-building Wheezy. It’s all down to experimenting with effects and “studio trickery”, Henwood tells me, pointing back down to his gear. To enhance the low end, he pitches the baritone down an octave and feeds it through a bass amp. For classic rock-style power chords, he adds more octaves and a fifth to the topline. Meanwhile, Keary adds delay and reverb to her drums to create space – a nod to the pair’s longstanding interest in dub. “It makes it a really fun way of writing music,” Henwood says of working as a duo. “The restriction somehow makes it quite free and open.” He continues: “We also feel like it means we can approach any genre because there is no genre – there is just a saxophone and a drum kit.” 

Lurking between the genre binaries is important to O. They often get mistaken for a jazz band (“people just look at the saxophone and assume,” Keary sighs), but she emphasises that they are not. Though they get booked for jazz-adjacent festivals, they enjoy finding the outliers in the audience. “There’ll always be a few people in the crowd who are rock or metal fans and have been brought along by a friend or a partner,” she says, smiling. “We find the rock fans at the jazz festivals, and the jazz fans at the rock festivals.”

Their debut LP, WeirdOs, released last month, tries to bottle the singular energy of their shows, which frequently involve chanting and mosh pits. Structurally, it corresponds with a live set list, opening with the atmospheric Intro and riding a wave of oscillating tension until closing with the amp-busting Slap Juice. In order to replicate this live feeling, chunks were recorded in one take with any blemishes preserved, like on Micro, where Henwood “freaked out and made it sound like a siren”, or on Wheezy, which was recorded during the onset of an asthma attack and renamed accordingly (“You can literally hear me wheezing through the sax!”)

Embracing the spontaneous, anything-goes alchemy of live performance makes absolute sense for a band bringing the ebullient, barely controlled chaos of creativity into the light. Looking around the studio at the mess of tangled wires and stray Froot Loops, you realise letting loose is all part of their ethos, and what makes O. so interesting. “The thing I’ve always enjoyed about live music is that it can go a bit wrong,” Keary says, and Henwood agrees: “There’s some sections where it goes really fucking badly and we just have to roll with it. But sometimes,” he says, shrugging, “that can make it sound better.”