Mouses Return With Sophomore Album “bwywtb”

Billingham, UK lo-fi garage queer-punk duo Mouses have today released their long-awaited second album, bwywtb, via Butterfly Effect. The new record is the pair’s first new material in 7 years after the release of their 2016 debut, The Mouses Album, during which time the pair have raised families, forged careers and explored identities. bwywtb stands for “Be Who You Want To Be”, a phrase and ideology that runs right through the album as well as everything Mouses do, it has become a motto of sorts for the band, and a call for the freedom to express yourself however you want, as well as a way to instill this confidence in expressing your true self into the Mouses audience too.

A feeling of hope is central to the new record, much more so than on their debut. Yes, there’s criticism of institutions, of corruption and abuse of power, of political apathy, of privilege, but where the first album ended at that, picking apart the injustices of the world, bwywtb comes much closer to offering a solution, or at the very least a feeling of how to move forward. Recorded in a bedroom in Bargett’s house between the summer of 2018 and the spring of 2019, and mixed by producer Rob Irish, bwywtb turns their experiences with The Mouses Album on its head. 

“On the first album we felt like we spent a whole lot of time trying to make a studio recording sound like it was recorded in a bedroom. this time, we wanted to do just that. There’s just something about DIY recording, especially in somewhere so homely, so familiar, that creates such a calmer environment. We felt we truly had time to experiment with different ideas, create more complex structures and compositions, all the while keeping that raw Mouses sound. There’s obviously drawbacks in the technology and space when doing something like this, but the ability to really take our time over writing parts, writing lyrics, and capturing a performance we were truly happy with hugely outweighed that.”