A decade is a long time in music. One listen to the Big Pink’s third album The Love That’s Ours, however, and the ten years since we last heard from them melt away. Grandeur mixed with melancholy, singalong tunes tinged with nagging doubt, dreamlike atmosphere and pure noise, electronic dystopia shrouding a spirit of hope, all driven by the big questions on identity, purpose and belonging… It’s all in there. And those ten years out of view have brought to the Big Pink a new character: experience. “The first album was that classic thing: is this actually happening?” says Robbie Furze, the sole founder member since his musical partner Milo Cordell left in 2013, of the Big Pink’s 2009 breakthrough A Brief History of Love. “There were no expectations, just two best friends working on music together, and to us it felt like an explosion. Then came the second record [Future This, 2012], which we thought we could bash out because we were now so busy on tour, but we soon realised that it didn’t have the same romance or importance of the first record and that affected Milo deeply. I remember doing the first gigs after Future This and thinking: something doesn’t feel right here. We were trying to get the songs written as quickly as possible and we neglected the essence of the Big Pink in the process.”
