INTERVIEW: Biig Piig on her debut album '11:11': "I realised that you can't really run from things that want to reveal themselves to you."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 6 February 2025

Irish born, London based singer Biig Piig (real name Jessica Smyth) is rapidly becoming one of this generation’s most compelling new talents with her genre blurring mix of dance pop, funk, indie and electronica and today she releases her debut album 11:11.

Born in Cork, Ireland she grew up in Spain , Ireland and the UK with her music career starting after she joined the music collective NiNE8 in 2015, followed by uploading her songs to SoundCloud in 2016. Releasing her debut EP Big Fan of the Sesh, Vol. 1 in 2018, she signed to major record label RCA in 2019 and followed this with two more EPs and her first ever mixtape Bubblegum in 2023.

Today she launches her debut album 11:11 with inspiration coming from self-discovery, identity, relationships and reaching a place of calm and peace after constant change and turmoil.

“11:11 has been a recurring number throughout my life, especially whilst writing this record,” Smyth says. “Whenever I see it, I take a moment to reflect and dream about the possibilities ahead. This album captures various points in my journey, symbolising synchronicity—the idea that things happen for a reason, exactly as they should. Through the highs and lows, this process has been exactly what it needed to be. 11:11 represents my reflections over the past two years, and the grounding I've found along the way.”

The album moves through multiple soundscapes and while at its heart Smyth’s music is electronic pop, she shows a masterful talent in presenting the known with a twist of the unknown - pure pop can be transformed to ethereal trance in a heartbeat, shimmering synths can merge with funk, alongside slides into alt and indie.

The album opens with the first single, 2024’s ‘4AM’ and it hits with an emotional punch from the very get go. With mellow, muted verses it ramps up into a glorious trancey, trip hop chorus with Smyth’s vocals remaining subtle, vulnerable throughout, she sings of the fear of loneliness around a relationship that is no more: ‘I still think about the kiss we had that day / How no one on this earth could make me feel that way / Breaks my heart to know it was the last time,’ she sings.

‘Cynical’ with it’s abstract bleeping opener and Smyth’s almost staccato vocal delivery has an intriguing electronic background that gathers strength as the song progresses before falling into a delicious multi-layered vocal swirl at the end.

Third single ‘Favourite Girl’ is still a standout with its 80s drenched synth beats and Smyth singing of giving into desire. ‘I'll be your favouritе girl / I'll give them something to talk about…Take, come take all my love
Say you'll stay the night.’ New single ‘9-5’ mixes funk and synth and explores the fine line between obsession and desire “I’ll go wherever you are…I’ll only do it for you’.

Second single ‘Decimal’ sees Smyth sing in Spanish, while ‘Silhouette’ is a slinky slice of synthpop that succeeds in feeling moody and - with its sparkling chorus and declaration of ‘crush!’ - deliciously sweet at the same time.

The end of the album brings a change in the sonics. ‘Stay Home’ embraces an indie-rock sound with a chant like chorus, followed by ‘One Way Ticket’ which opens with just acoustic guitar and while a gentle electronic beat is introduced it retains the feel of alt-indie, with even a hint of surf pop. The lyrics combine grief with a powerful message of hope as Smyth thinks of someone that has passed and how proud they would be of her journey: ‘If you could see me now / I know that you'd say "I told ya"‘.

The album ends on something of a highlight with ‘Brighter Day’. Arguably the most experimental track on the album, it features heavily distorted vocals, music box instrumentation and a shuffling beat that is reminiscent of trip-hop before it ends with a brass section. It again sees Smyth singing of grief, echoing some lyrics from ‘Brighter Day’, but in a way that is hopeful and brings a sense of calm: ‘You’ve moved on / But this isn’t goodbye / Know one day I’ll see you on the other side.’ It is a beautiful, dreamy way to end the album that leaves you with a sense of peace, a feeling Smyth describes of having flashes of clarity when everything makes sense: “it’s about chasing those moments, losing them, and finding them again,” she says.

11:11 is a first class debut album which solidifies Smyth’s rise as one of pop’s most exciting young stars. It’s synth and electropop foundation may hint of 1980s nostalgia, but its musicality is deeper, more complex and thrilling than mere retropop. Truly an engrossing musical journey, look at this album as the beginning of Biig Piig’s superstar era. We recently caught up with her to find out all about 11:11’s creation.

Hi Jess! Lovely to see you and thank you for sparing us a moment in what is I imagine a very momentous time in your life.
Yeah, it's been crazy. It's a crazy old time.

That's such a casual way of putting it, I bet it's really bloody exciting!
It is. It's moving by really, really fast. It’s crazy you feel like you wait for these moments for so long, and then it comes and you blink, and it's nearly over. The process of putting this together has taken so much time and effort and detail and the fact that it's out today it's like, what's going on? But it’s been cool.

When you say that you’ve been imagining this and dreaming about this for so long, has that always been one of those mental vision boards you’ve had since you started singing and creating music? ‘What's it going to feel like when I put my debut album out?’
Yeah, I think what it is is the way that albums held me in such a time that I needed to feel seen and feel heard. There was records that I really lost myself in, you can create a reality inside them and it can really help you get through a lot of times. I've always held albums that have made me feel like that, that that you can escape into, in such a high regard. And I was like it'd be incredible to do a full length album just for the fact that someone else could escape into it. It's why it's a surreal feeling when you finally get there, I guess it feels like a nod to your younger self - we did it and we got through and now you've made one. It feels really nice.

I love that. I always refer to it as bedroom floor music. When you're young all you do is lay on your bedroom floor, stomp around with your headphones in and just absorb an album. So to then be making one, that's pretty exceptional. And it's a pretty exceptional album too. Before I get all excited about the songs and themes, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the title. Can you talk to me a little bit about 11:11?
My life and the making of the album in the last three years was kind of chaotic. it was a lot of stopping and starting and running around and on tour then off tour, and there just wasn't really a second to breathe. So I was writing a lot and not really taking things in as much, until I would get like a second to just be ‘Okay, just breathe and listen to everything’ and it kind of gave me timestamps throughout. 11:11, was a reoccurring thing where whenever I would see that, no matter what I was doing, I would stop and think about people I'm grateful for, things in my life that are happening and just kind of have a moment of gratitude and peace while everything else is going on. As a whole project, it feels like a moment of reflections, and I really wanted to put that in the title.

That’s beautiful. I want to talk a little bit about your emotional shifting with this album. With your mixtape Bubblegum, I felt like we were in the club, and 11:11 is the long drive or walk home where part of you is still on that dance floor, but you're processing it all.
That is actually such a beautiful way to put it - a drive home.

Is that a little bit of how you felt putting this together? I guess that comes from reflection and a little more grounding and a little more mud in your treads in the industry?
Definitely. I went into this record thinking I was going to make a dance heavy record. I had the single ‘Watch Me’ in 2023 and I was like, ‘Cool. I'm going to base it around this, I'm going to make a whole record off of this’. When we started making tunes, I was like, actually, maybe it isn't where I want to go with it. And then we made ‘4AM’ and I felt more that I wanted to make something around that sentiment which was still dancing and something you can escape into, but also has a lot more softer moments and lyrically is quite vulnerable. I was like, ‘cool, I want to be able to be able to make more of this’. To be honest, I never really go into a project knowing exactly what I'm going to do. I tried to, and it really didn't work! You never know exactly what wants to come out of you, you just have to keep making and then suddenly you're like that's exactly what it was meant to be.

You recorded a part of this album Motorbass studio in Paris, which is like dance club Mecca, but you've brought this ethereal hum to it, which I think is a really beautiful thing. How much of that European dance sound came with your location?
That's the thing I always find my feet through music. Drop me anywhere and I know that I'll find a way to romanticise or really explore it through music. It comes through, I think, in the record. Motorbass was one of my favorite places ever to write, I don't think I'll ever feel that way about a studio, it was insane. It's just an open space and you don't want to do anything but create there. Such a beautiful part of making this album was being able to experience writing there, and being in Montmartre to be honest. It has this tiny little village vibe, it's somewhere that you can kind of float and disappear into, and at the same time feel very held and safe. There's so many creatives and artists there I really found my flow, I loved it. It was the same in London, I think I needed to miss London to love it again. After I moved away, coming back, it's so special. There's inspiration in every corner, it gives you what you give it a lot of the time. There's still so much magic in the music scene here. The places that I create music in definitely bleed into the music that I make.

It's interesting you say that because I feel there's a lot of that in this album, thematically with your melody, not even necessarily always lyrically, this notion of homesickness for a whole bunch of homes, whether they be people or places. I wanted to ask you a little bit about ‘9-5’ because you have this beautiful kind of anti-gravity sound your voice, like it’s heading out into space, it's gorgeous. How did it come onto the album?
This track is about a gorgeous time in my relationship, where everything is rose tinted glasses and you're floating in that feeling. It's very gorgeous, I loved it. But it was also the first track that we wrote in Motorbass and it just came together so easily. I don't know what it was, I think it was just falling in love and being in a city that I was also falling in love with and just trying to capture that moment. 9 to 5 is also the healthy daytime thing, it's like this might be something that's going to really steady me. And then ‘4AM’ is, like, off the rails!

I know you said you didn't go in with an idea of what the album was about, just that you were going to make it. But I'm curious, what is something that you were surprised to learn about yourself in the making of this?
I guess something that I realised personally is that you can't really run from things that want to reveal themselves to you. There's a lot in this project as well that initially I was like, ‘I don't really want to go into that’, I'd be writing songs like ‘One Way Ticket’ and ‘Brighter Day’ and I was like, ‘I can't put that on, it's not gonna make sense’. The decision to include those tracks in particular came from you have to just do it with heart, and you have to do it the way that you would have wanted an artist to do if you were younger. Show all sides. There was definitely a lot of moments of trusting myself more than I have before. I've grown a lot in the last few years as well. I've been through a lot of different stages of relationship too that has meant that I need to just trust myself more going forward. And I have, and with this record I learned a lot about that

Beautiful, I love that. Before I leave you, we spoke quite a bit about your younger self and absorbing an album, who were the sheroes making those albums that you were listening to, that made you go, ‘I want to do this’?
There's so many. Gabrielle, Ben Harper, Britney Spears. Honestly, Circus, I used to love that. Ty Smith I loved. The Cranberries. There were a lot of bands, a lot of incredible writers. I'll be here all day!

11:11 is out now via RCA Records. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Biig Piig on Instagram.

Biig Piig 2025 Album Headline tour dates:
15 February - 02 Institute 2, Birmingham,
17 February- 3Olympia, Dublin
19 February - The Limelight 2, Belfast
20 February - SWG3 (TV Studio), Glasgow
21 February - New Century Hall, Manchester
23 February - Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
26 February - SWX, Bristol
27 February - Roundhouse, London
1 March- Trix Club, Antwerp
3 March - Uebel & Gefaehrlich, Hamburg
4 March - Festaal Kreuzberg, Berlin
5 March - Pumpehuset, Copenhagen
7 March - La Cigale, Paris
8 March - Melkweg MAX, Amsterdam