Where the world looks heavy, Good Neighbours with Blue Sky Mentality set a sign of ease.
It is a late afternoon in September in Berlin when I meet the two from Good Neighbours: Oli Fox and Scott Real. The British duo sits side by side, laughs, pulls out cables under shirts and seriously discusses how to best hide a lavalier microphone. Such moments before an interview are always exciting – especially when cameras run. A touch of nervousness is in the air, but its looseness is just as noticeable, which is also reflected in her music. Even this little banter shows how the two ticks: two guys who were lucky with their music – and who are now grasping with the same ease for larger ones.
Recommendations of the editorial team
A sound that transports lightness – in a world that is often anything but easy
Her sound moves somewhere between indie rock, folk and pop. Anyone who hears their songs may first think of the euphoric force of Bastille, the hymnic folk by The Lumineers or the playful electronics by MGMT and Empire of the Sun. But this mixture is your own sound – a sound that transports lightness, in a world that is often anything but easy.
To the video interview:
“We noticed that we just have more fun together”
Scott Raffe and Oli Fox met in the hallways of a London studio complex. They made a door at the door on their own songs, wrote for others – but it didn’t really go. Until someone said, “Try it together.” They did it and suddenly this spark was there. “We noticed that we just have more fun together,” they say today. Without pressure, without calculus, simply music for yourself. Maybe that’s exactly why your music works better in pairs. The name Good Neighbours came by itself: two rooms next to each other, a kind of musical house community – and in the end a project that should grow bigger than they thought.
“It was actually just a snippet, we wanted to test if someone likes it”
And then came “Home”. At the beginning of 2024, a song that was taken during a lunch break. No strategy, no label plan – just a spontaneous chorus, sung in a take. “It was actually just a snippet, we wanted to test whether someone likes it,” they say. A few days later, the video on Tikkok rushed through the ceiling with millions of calls. “We later watched the video and thought: that can’t really happen,” they laugh. But it had happened. The world had become aware of it in one fell swoop – and the two knew that this one song turned their life upside down.
Blue Sky Mentality will be released on October 03, 2025
The title already indicates what good Neighbour drives: the look ahead, the trust that a blue sky is waiting somewhere. “We had already written five or six songs before” Home “went through the ceiling,” they emphasize. “That was why it was not pressure, but rather a tailwind.”
“We were only at home for ten days”
They have been almost non -stop for a year and a half. “We were only at home for ten days in total,” they say. Nevertheless, they pretend to consciously perceive moments – for example when they faced a huge amount at the Glastonbury Festival. Or on tour in Germany: “After a concert we were sitting in the van, the sun went behind a hill, and suddenly this was calm. We thought: blatant, that’s our life now.”