The Big Moon are mapping their own story

There comes a point when the milestones start to run out. You get the degree, or you don't. You find the job you wanted, or another one that will do. Maybe you get married, maybe you get divorced, maybe you have a family. And then what? For The Big Moon, the question of what comes after the happily ever after has become the starting point for Forever, a record that finds the band looking ahead without necessarily knowing what they're looking for.

“I definitely feel like I'm reaching that stage, if I'm not already there,” says Jules Jackson, reflecting on the ideas that emerged while writing the album. “We're at the age where everyone's sort of making decisions that affect the rest of your life.” Choices about family, where to live and what comes next can feel increasingly permanent, even as the future becomes harder to picture. “You get to a point where you're like, ‘Well, what am I aiming for?’ Life just sort of keeps on tumble-weeding.”

Jackson didn't set out to make an album about this uncertainty. The title only began to take shape towards the end of the writing process, when she recognised a thread connecting the songs. “I don't know if it's something I decided to write about. I think it's just something that came out,” she explains. “I realised as I was sort of coming to the end of writing it that I was constantly singing about, like, eternity and foreverness, and what's next. Then it all kind of made sense.”

The album's search for a happy ending began somewhere more immediate. The past couple of years had brought a significant readjustment for Jackson, who was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma in 2024. The benign but destructive cyst required surgery to remove and left her with almost no hearing in one ear. During this difficult period, she found herself writing songs that reflected how she felt, but weren't helping her feel any better. “I found myself writing really sad songs, and I was just like, ‘Who's this for? Like, I'm not enjoying it. It's not making me feel any better.’”

Instead, she decided to imagine what 'feeling better' might sound like. “I just did a full turnaround and was like, ‘Let's just write some songs for when I feel better.’” A type of manifestation, the future she pictured wasn't one of grand achievements, but simply being back on stage with the band and well enough to enjoy it. In that sense, Forever became a way of writing towards a life she hadn't quite returned to yet.

That sense of possibility runs through an album that moves between psych-pop, funkier rhythms and guitar-led moments. Jackson often starts with an instrument or a sound she likes, repeating it until words begin to emerge. Her writing process sometimes involves an unlikely companion: muted YouTube videos, ranging from Disney films to four-hour GoPro drives through the desert.

Rather than drawing direct inspiration from what she's watching, she's looking for a way to escape her immediate surroundings. “Music is so transcendent in a way that it gives you this soundtrack to moments in your life that are sometimes quite mundane,” she muses. A desert drive playing silently in the background can offer a sense of being somewhere else, even when she's sitting in her bedroom at the keyboard.

The songs themselves can take similarly unexpected turns. “Gravity” began life as a power ballad, complete with multiple tempos and key changes, before Fern Ford suggested turning it into a disco track. Drawing on the drums of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ford found a way to give the song more bite. “The drum beat in Gravity changed the whole song,” Jackson recalls. “After you came up with that, we were like, okay, let's go down that road.”

It's a reminder that, despite the personal ideas underpinning Forever, The Big Moon's music remains a collective effort. Jackson leaves room for the others to reshape her demos, with the band developing songs together before taking them into the studio. Ford's own production work has also opened up new possibilities. On “Sounds”, she used tape loops recorded on a four-track machine, capturing the other members singing into separate channels and embracing the imperfections. “It was out of time, which is what made that moment work,” she explains. “I'm just absolutely chuffed the tape loop's gone onto the new record.”

Jackson, meanwhile, has grown more confident writing with people outside the band, learning to make up melodies and lyrics in front of strangers. It's not always comfortable. “You have to really embarrass yourself to do that,” she laughs. “There's no, like, magic way to do it. You just do it in this really dumb way. Even Taylor Swift.” It’s a willingness to keep learning that comes in handy in an industry that has changed considerably since the band's early days, when touring meant sleeping on sofas and playing small venues wherever they could. They now have more freedom to choose which tours to take on, although Jackson, a parent of two, jokes that life on the road can feel like a break from cleaning porridge off the floor.

The industry itself presents a different set of challenges. Ford points to shrinking financial opportunities for musicians and the increasingly complicated demands of promoting a record online. What worked for one album might not work for the next. “I think the idea of starting a band right now, I just would not know where to start,” she admits. Neither Ford nor Jackson is particularly interested in dwelling on those difficulties. They're conscious that making music for a living is a privilege, and hopeful that new artists will find their own ways through. “Maybe it's harder to start a band in the way that we started a band,” considers Jackson, “but I think people will still keep making amazing music.”

For now, the focus is on giving Forever a life beyond the studio. Ford is looking forward to sharing the songs through intimate in-store performances, where the music can take on meanings the band might never have anticipated. “It stops being just ours, and then you can see how it's being received by other people and what it means to other people,” she says. Beyond that, Jackson wants to move house, write more songs and play her guitar. She's also dreaming of a big tour, complete with elaborate staging, props, lights and glitter. It's not quite a grand five-year plan, but perhaps that's the point.

Forever is an album that doesn't offer a definitive answer to what comes next. Instead, it finds something liberating in the possibility that there might not be one. The milestones might run out, the rules might change, and the future might refuse to settle into anything resembling a plan. But there are still songs to write, places to go and things to make. Sometimes, I think that's a happy ending in itself.