Biig Piig living the moment back ‘home’ in Cork

GIVEN Jessica Smyth’s nomadic upbringing, spending the overwhelming majority of her life living outside the country of her birth, her accent and manners are disarmingly familiar. Born in Ireland in 1998, she moved to Spain when she was four. She returned for two years when she was 12, before moving to London with her family, where they lived above the pub her parents ran.

She met her tribe at the city’s Richmond College, and those friends have remained with her, proving staunch collaborators. Since she was 17, she has been releasing music at a prolific rate under the name Biig Piig. Her singles are condensed and exuberant bursts of pop and club influenced sounds encompassing the range from electro to breakbeat, her hushed delivery communicating the wonder and excitement of the eternal now.

On occasion, her songs have been sprinkled with passages of Spanish, adding to the impression of her being a thoroughly modern and metropolitan citizen of the world.

But in conversation, her voice and manners feel totally Irish.

“It’s where I was born and where I feel a lot of my culture is,” she offers. “Even when we lived in Spain, all my family, we grew up Irish.”

Cork just happens to be where she was born. She retains a greater connection to Tralee, where she briefly attended secondary school at the start of the last decade and has relatives living there.

“I haven’t been back in a while, but it’s just such a great town,” she enthuses.

Her first time playing Cork was in 2022, the year when she began to make waves. One of the three great singles she released then, Kerosene, was shortlisted for the RTÉ Choice Music Award Song of the Year, and she received an enthusiastic and rapturous response at Cyprus Avenue.

“It was gorgeous,” she recalls. “I had loads of family come down, which was great. And the energy was brilliant.”

But Smyth especially cherishes that occasion because her aunt was there with her husband. Cyprus Avenue was where they first met, back in the ’90s, and Smyth is delighted to relate the event.

“She met him because they were smoking inside and there was some big festival going on, and the story is she burned his t-shirt with a cigarette and they laughed about it and they ended up just being together, and they’re still together now.

“So she was like, it’s such a mad thing to come down with him, and her niece playing in the place that they met.

“There’s loads of reasons that I love playing there,” Smyth adds, “but also for what it means history-wise.”

It’s certainly a classic meet-cute story, and in the circumstances of Jess getting to perform there in their presence, in the place of her birth, it highlights the unexpected twists and turns that life can take.

“You know it is,” Smyth gasps. “How the threads take so many different routes but they always find their way back to each other, which is so nice.”

Indeed. And there’s a circularity to the tale that raises the ideas of serendipity, kismet, or even coincidence. Ideas that resonate strongly in the title of Biig Piig’s debut album, 11:11, which she released earlier this year. During her time recording the album, she would often look at the studio’s digital clock and be met by those numbers.

Some regard it as the angel number, a divine sequencing. Biig Piig isn’t the first artist to title their album thusly. 1990s grunge-era band Come did the same thing, having had a similar studio experience. They described it as a recurring phenomenon, where it became a sort of superstitious mantra. For Smyth, this number has been a recurring motif in her life, illustrating for her evidence of greater forces being at play.

“I think that’s what it is,” she insists. “It’s like I think once you lean into kinda having faith in what’s going to happen — and it’s hard to, I think, especially when you’ve had things that haven’t worked out, or relationships that haven’t worked out, or taken a chance on something and sometimes it fails — it’s a hard thing to just trust the process and trust that you’re on the path that you’re meant to be on. But it’s such an incredible thing when you do.

She continues: “The title of the album for me anyway is more when those numbers come up on the clock there was so much going on and the chaos of running around and life in general was kinda mad, and so whenever I saw that I’d just take a moment to kinda be grateful and bring myself back and just kind of zoom out for a second and just think, ‘okay, whatever happens now just take a minute to really appreciate where we are and just know that we’re in the right place.’

“And I think the more that you do that the more you realise things do become serendipitous. There’s so many threads between us that you don’t see. I feel like it’s just trusting the process really.”

This approach has served her well so far. While she enjoys the support of major labels like RCA and Sony, Biig Piig has never given the impression of having a master plan. In fact, she chortles at the very suggestion.

“To be honest, I’ve never been one who’s been great for planning. I love living in the moment. I love the thing of striking when intuition wants you to or when you feel it’s the right time to go. And it can be a nightmare to work with me sometimes because a lot of things are last minute.

“Or an idea comes to you and you’re suddenly like, ‘cool! I’m doing this right now.’ I’m not very good at planning long term, and maybe that’s because of the way that I grew up and the way that things have been where things have changed so drastically that you kind of have to think quick on your feet, very much like trust intuition over a plan. But I love doing that. I feel like it gives way more for creativity to thrive and for ideas to flourish.”

Biig Piig plays Cyprus Avenue on Thursday, July 17. Doors 7pm.