From Patti LaBelle to Betty Davis, Nona Hendryx to Skin from Skunk Anansie, hard-rocking women of colour have blazed an unapologetic trail in the music industry for decades. They may be small in relative numbers but they are mighty in impact. And yet London rock duo Nova Twins were regarded as an outlier novelty by the mainstream music business until their ferocious, eloquent noise could be denied no more.

Singer/guitarist Amy Love and bassist Georgia South are quick to point out that their music connected from the off with audiences in the grassroots alt.rock and punk scenes. Their long road to mainstream acceptance is all the more bewildering to the duo because their path to collaboration was so unforced. Love and South knew each other from their schooldays and gravitated naturally to the same open-mic nights where their mutual love of heavy music spawned Nova Twins in 2014.

‘We’d always come away from these nights talking about how it went, so we thought let’s write songs,’ says South. ‘We wrote our first song and our sound was just there instantly; gnarly bass and vocals were the foundation of Nova and then we just gigged and gigged and gigged. We really did start on the punk scene playing countless shows to five people and then ten, and then a thousand. It was a long journey.’

^{Pictures: Federica Burelli}

 Nova Twins were undaunted. As their name suggests, the duo enjoy a superglue bond. ‘At the beginning we were so in sync,’ says South. ‘When we would talk about our dreams they were so similar and we had the same tunnel vision path to where we wanted to go and how we wanted to experiment. We had this synergy, even to the way we would wear clothes.’

The Nova Twins style is as loud as their music, a patchwork of punky colour and cultural references from sci-fi to street wear to leather girls. Love and South still make their own stage clothes and have even set up their own unofficial clothing company Bad Stitches, ‘because we were literally being bad at it’’ says Love. The result is a stand-out outfit who appear impossible to overlook. Better late than never, the industry which didn’t know where to place them has now fully submitted to their kickass rush.

Their Prodigy-influenced 2020 full-length debut was rhetorically titled Who Are The Girls? Any lingering doubts about the answer were settled by their follow-up Supernova, which was nominated for this year’s Mercury Prize and is their proud product of lockdown. ‘A lot was happening not just because the world was in chaos, but with political movements like Black Lives Matter,’ says Love. ‘And there was stuff going on in our personal lives that dramatically changed things and all of that went into the album. The album gave us direction and hope, and that feeling of no matter what push-back you get to keep moving on, turning that energy on its head. We wanted people listening to the album to feel strong; yes, you’re a boss bitch and we’ll tell you that every day on [former single] ‘Cleopatra’.’ 

Having had to find their own way with little encouragement from above, Nova Twins are now determined to use their platform, including lobbying for the MOBO Awards to add a Rock/Alternative category and boost representation across the musical spectrum. ‘We’ve always seen ourselves on the outside looking in,’ says Love, ‘so we have compassion for other people who feel they don’t fit in to society’s beauty ideals or social norms. We’re just trying to make it better for everyone.’

Nova Twins tour from Thursday 10–Saturday 12 November, and Friday 10 February–Saturday 4 March; Supernova is out now on Marshall Records.