Birdpen - Think of Nice Things Birdpen

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 both worked together for many years with BirdPen and Archive, Bird & Pen have never been short on ideas and Think Of Nice Things was written 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 talking some time out following the Pandemic and the delayed release and tour of their last album All Function One.

Pen says – I think the fact that we wrote our previous album All Function One about isolation and being trapped inside just as the pandemic hit was quite a mad concept we didn’t actually think would come true. To then tour it in a post pandemic world was kind of strange so after that I think we needed a bit of a break from the BirdPen world we have 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, would 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 and ideas about how our world is changing so quickly and the continued unknown of what our so-called World leaders will do to us all alongside AI and conflict, the words just came flooding 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 of this album is the track order – the songs were written in the order of which they are compiled 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 more free and energetic than our previous works and with the title – Think Of Nice Things I think its 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, scare mongering, anxiety and misinformation so the album and title is our way of escaping.

The new album was recorded and produced by both Mike Bird & Dave Pen at Paalsund Studios where it was also mixed & mastered Fredrik Okazak Stockholm, Sweden.