From FIZZ: Sometimes in life, you sit round a kitchen table with your friend-family and throw around a dream idea with each other. It could be; “let’s move to the countryside, build ourselves a little commune with a vegetable garden and cook dinners for each other every night”. Or perhaps; “let’s start a band using all of our experience of the music industry we’ve gathered over 10 years of being solo artists and write the most unserious, least-pressured album that is bursting with joy and saturation. Then let’s build a world of circus-y, wild lore around the whole thing in which we all live in an imaginary part theme-park, part alien-town called FIZZVILLE complete with a strawberry jam volcano, fireworks and ferris wheels.”

The commune is yet to be built, but our wacky, wonky, maximalist band idea somehow grew legs and crawled its way over to our favourite studio to record an album under the band-name; ‘FIZZ’. Our record needed some accompanying visuals, and so in May ’23 our baby band travelled to Barcelona to work with an incredible creative director and his team – JP Bonino and ‘The Rats’; a creative collective we knew could match our vision of an alternative world. Our darling friend and visionary Karina Barberis came along to capture the vibes.

This was our first photoshoot as a band, and the novelty of it all was exhilarating; focussed makeup artists and hair stylists would be flicking their brushes on cheeks and tugging extensions on hair, all while we watched our glossy best friends pose to imaginary scenes dreamed up by JP, jumping on trampolines to his encouraging directions between camera flashes. “The joke’s gone too far, guys” – a quip we found ourselves saying constantly, to try and process the huge gratitude and luck we felt to have such a talented team on our side.

The FIZZ family portrait that came from that shoot was the first time we sat together as a band – a familiar feeling of being in front of the camera but with an added giddiness of feeling part of something bigger, the weight of standing alone shared.

After a whirlwind album release, we bookended our campaign with the music video for “The Secret To Life” – a meta, Truman show-esc story created by director Lulu Vicedomini and brought to life by another dedicated team, including Art Directors Studio GAAS and our favourite stylist, Rubina Marchiori. The novelty of sharing space on set together was still very much alive – smoking cigarettes and miming to our own song, as if we had stepped into an imaginary playground game. But 6 months on from our Barcelona shoot something felt different – we had settled into ourselves individually and as a group, and we felt comfortable standing there in our outfits crafted by Rubina, mixing our own personal styles with the funhouse brief from Lulu’s world. We positioned ourselves together on camera, adjusting automatically to our wild range in height as a band and making sure to equally disperse attention – this was not our first rodeo anymore!

Watch the video for “The Secret To Life”…