Big Truck would rather sing about love than shout about the state of things

Someone’s looking to borrow a card reader, another person sorting out confusion about the guest list, the band are ordering Thai food from a resident food truck, and vocalist Laurie Vincent is buying a round out of uncertain affordability until the money clears tomorrow. I’m privy to glimpses of a scrappy, good-natured familial disorder that Big Truck seem to thrive on, and it's as good a place as any to start talking about where the band actually came from.

Vincent is best known as one half of the punk-rock duo Soft Play, and it would be easy to assume that Big Truck exists because he needed somewhere to put the songs that didn't fit. But as I would find out, the band is a product of Vincent and drummer Sam Coppin’s concern for a friend. In some ways, the project simply fell into their laps.

"Sam and I were meeting up out of a concern for a mutual friend, and we were working out some stuff," Vincent explains. "We ended up having these really long, drawn-out phone calls, because we'd known each other for maybe fifteen years, and we'd never had this in our lives before - sitting there talking for two hours, this intense connection. And then once we'd made our plans of what we had to do to help our friend, the conversation around music just arrived. I was like, I've got these songs I've been working on. It was very much me presenting Sam these ideas, him giving this huge encouragement, and then it being, I'll help you make this - never intending it to become a fully fledged thing like it has.”

Their formation feels light, unburdened by the usual, driving pressure of industry ambition, which seems like the path of least resistance. Coppins — previously of fellow Tunbridge Wells band Lady Bird — had crossed paths with Vincent once twenty years ago. Ideas around forming a band together ebbed and flowed, but never quite came together for reasons that neither party can recall now. Big Truck, in that sense, is less conceptualised as a totally new project, but presents more as an old thread picked back up. "There's a mystical element to it," Coppins muses. "It's like we're getting the band back together when we never got a band together in the first place.”

Big Truck might seem somewhat distant from Soft Play's scorched-earth energy, but it hasn’t been completely abandoned. Where Vincent previously provided the musical backbone while Isaac James took the vocal lead, Big Truck puts him at the front for the first time, and the influences that come pouring out are softer, more varied, and distinctly more melodic. Vincent cites The Cure, The Smiths, The War On Drugs, Sam Fender, and even The Breeders. "Because I'm taking the helm of the lyricist and the primary songwriter, my natural influences are just coming out on my sleeve," he says. "In Soft Play, a lot of the vocal ideas are from Isaac. The more melodic stuff is something I've always been into, whether I've realised it or not.”

A culmination of broad influences and experiences, Big Truck’s songwriting features multitudes as the band flesh out the rest of their textured sound with their own distinct backgrounds. Coppins draws from jazz percussion, while keyboardist Justin Myles is rooted in R&B and soul, and guitarist Justin Thallon draws from his time spent as a metal guitarist. Look to their debut album, Midday At The Middleway, and you’ll find that these stacked dynamics constitute a clean slate with fresh bite. The songs honour post-punk grooves, lean into being impressionistic, and play with the accessibility of pop songcraft. Vincent still oscillates — often within a single song — from shouting to singing, something that he simply attributes to attitude versus a commitment to genre. "The band still has a raw energy to it, that attitude of humour, directness, and rawness, even in Big Truck. It does slide from shouting to singing. There's definitely still got the vibe of what we've done in the past.”

While still retaining some past structures, Big Truck’s approach to developing the new material came with different strategic points. "The process came around as a want to play together, which we started as the two of us in my basement, and then Asa joined. When we realised we wanted to record it live, to have that magic telepathy that happens once you're playing, we booked a residency in our local pub. We did four or five shows down there. By the time we arrived at the studio, we knew where we wanted the vocals to sit.”

Ultimately, this residency served as Big Truck’s foundation. Vincent wanted the opposite of the demo-to-release side projects he'd done before to better understand how the music might land with different crowds. "I was really intent on testing the material out live first, rather than jumping on a stage and going straight to 'we've got an album'. And we followed what felt really good to play.” 

This also guided them towards selecting singles “Collided" and “Central Reservation Blues”, both of which came together with spontaneous piecing. “Central Reservation Blues” is the song that introduced most people to Big Truck back in April, and according to Coppins, it was played live exactly once before it was recorded. "We prepared more than we knew we had time to record. Out of about thirty demos - he [Vincent] was doing one, sometimes two, a day for a while - I'd go through them and stamp which ones I felt were worth bringing into rehearsal. Some of them, like ‘Central Reservation Blues’, we only played once, at the last gig we did. So the studio recording of that was like the second or third time we'd ever played it.”

"I hear a lot of melodies in my head. I write music because I hear it, and then I try and work it out. There was this missing piece of the puzzle," Vincent says. "The demo didn't have the hook. I was like, I can hear this hook, and I sang it, and Justin just did it. That's the incredible thing about collaborating with so many talented musicians. You can just say what you want to do, and they can do it.”

The way that Vincent and Coppins speak on the spirituality that informs Big Truck’s cohesion makes the band feel like a true whole, a spiral continuing towards a shared desire to create and connect — notably when they identify what holding space to unify their individual talents looks like in practice — with Vincent bringing up Myles as an example. "Our keyboard player is autistic, and I learned that at school he had to wear ear defenders, because the applause would trigger him. Now, when you see him on stage, he's an animal. I realised the whole point of Big Truck is it starts off with me trying to wrestle with myself, and then it's this connection between everyone, and how joyful it is that we now have someone who's gone from that to being on stage with us. He steals the show every single time.”

In this same breath, the band are prioritising a sense of looseness to avoid allowing the songs to calcify into fixed structures, especially when it comes to articulating them in a live setting. This is something that Vincent traces back to advice from Coppins, who nudged him towards embracing the unexpected within the music. “Sam sort of egged me on, like a musical director thing, where he's like, just do stuff, lean into spontaneity,” Vincent recalls. “I like the idea that songs are always evolving. Once you release it, it's not yours any more, and every time you play it, it's a new version.”

While connection consistently comes up as a talking point between Vincent and Coppins, identifying the ways by which they understand and challenge one another feels pertinent to their flow. "Finding one other person that you can link with on a spiritual level, someone who just gets you - it's almost impossible, because we're all so obsessed with our own realities," Vincent says. "Sam said to me, ‘I don't really have anyone else I can talk to about this stuff. Why haven't we explored this connection before?’" It's also, unmistakably, a reaction against the clamour of current social disarray. "I said it on stage the other night - why don't we just go back to the Beatles and talk about love?,” Vincent asks. “It's so divisive out there, and so easy to divide. I don't want to get on stage and call everyone names. I'm sick of being barraged with hate. Why don't we all just come together and vibe?”

Coppins' answer to the same disruption is more subdued, and arises from a long stretch of his life spent absorbing the darker version of the world, and a shift in his perspective that landed just a few years ago. "I submit myself fully to the faith that whilst you've got to stand up to evil, and fight the good fight, you can also transform your karma so that you become happier, but also evolve spiritually. I have absolute faith that the good fight will be won, and the only way to ensure that is to work on myself, and help others become happy." While he endeavours to do his part, signing petitions and standing behind friends further out on the front lines than he is, there’s a limit to what any one person can carry. However, the music that he creates with Big Truck is a point of resolve. ”I haven't got the energy to go to every protest. But I have got the energy to create something.”

Fundamentally, this is the engine that fuels everything that Big Truck have been doing this year, as well as the persistence that has brought them to the point of sharing their first full-length work. And it's why the band's focus is on what they can do to appease rooms full of people. It’s what keeps Vincent going through the more challenging aspects of the job and the dour weight of societal division, and he doesn't hesitate to give his ability to perform the credit where it’s due. "Getting on stage, this is the treat. Everything else is stressful. But watching people engage in the room is so fulfilling. That is the fire that keeps it going." There's still a lingering wrestle within the few moments before Vincent addresses an audience, an inner voice telling him everyone hates it that he fights to push back. And typically, Coppins, is the one who talks him back from it before every show. "He's the biggest cheerleader,” Vincent says fondly. “Not in an overconfident way, but he always just says to perform as if you've already done it.”

Now signed to Marshall Records, the plan ahead sees Big Truck barreling forward with immense charge. They’re gearing up for more headline shows, a homecoming date at the Tunbridge Wells Forum, in-store shows the week of release, and festival slots dotted around in the summer "It only takes one year to change your life, and we're giving it a proper go," Vincent asserts. "This band isn't about having a breakout TikTok moment. It's about connecting with people in person, and seeing that they're so enthusiastic about what we're doing. That always feels like a really good indicator that you're onto something real."