Life comes at you fast. Just ask Big Special. On the evening of August 9, 2023, the duo – Joe Hicklin  and Callum Moloney – walked onstage storied Camden boozer the Dublin Castle for their first  headlining gig in the capital. The duo had only a single release to their name: the majestic, cathartic,  existential bellow of ‘Shithouse’, 7-inches of which were posted to fans on their mailing list that month.  Their acclaimed debut album, 2024’s Postindustrial Hometown Blues, was still just a pile of voice memo demos, drum patterns and couplets scribbled in Hicklin’s notebooks, nothing yet committed to  tape. The Big Special story had barely begun. 

Fast-forward 20 or so months later, however, and Hicklin and Moloney are again onstage, this time at  the O2 Forum Kentish Town, sweat-drenched and bathing in the rapture as the biggest headline show  of their career so far draws to a triumphant close. They’re looking out at 2,300 or so fans, hands aloft, a  fraction of the following that have been drawn by the righteous missives and unflinching poetry of  Postindustrial Hometown Blues, by these anthems of struggle and darkness and honesty. Alongside  the screams and applause, the immortal words of David Byrne – “Well, how did I get here?” – are likely  ringing in their ears. As Moloney notes, the Forum is only a kilometre walk away from the Dublin  Castle. But the distance Big Special have covered between those two shows is far greater than can be  plotted on a map. 

The journey between those poles, from then to now, is one of the key stories told by their second  album, National Average. And trust Big Special to weld those stories to basslines that boom like a blitz,  hooks that drive in deep and beats that find funk in feeling fucked and could rouse a broken body to  move – to invest those stories with wisdom, insight, the blackest humour and the most absolute  humanity. And these might be their stories, but the lessons speak to us all. “I like to explore broader

issues through personal experiences,” explains Hicklin, “This might be stuff that happened to us, but  it’s shit everyone will recognise.”