For London-based Irish musician Biig Piig (aka Jessica Smyth), this is a summer to embrace the energy of festival crowds. ‘We’ve got the set to a place I’m really happy with now,’ she says proudly. ‘With some of the tracks, I feel like we’ve put them into a live setting and made them bigger than they are on record. Playing our first festival last week, I thought, “this is sick”. It was the best feeling in the world.’
It makes sense that her debut mixtape Bubblegum is resonating with festival audiences. Featuring a mixture of garage beats, glistening pop shimmers and Biig Piig’s silken voice, Bubblegum’s stratospheric sound blasts out of speakers like rays of sunshine. ‘It was never supposed to be a mixtape. It was just me making tracks hoping to figure out where I was going to go with an album. Looking at it now, there are so many different pockets it sits in sonically because of the producers I worked with. I think it was a stepping stone, helping me test the waters to see that you can have different songs in a project and still make it fluid. That’s what I want the album to be when it’s done.’

A highlight of the mixtape, ‘Picking Up’ hits on the fluidity and variation Smyth is discussing, veering wildly from slow guitar-picking to hyperactive drum & bass rhythms, the underlying melancholia of her lyrics offset by dancefloor-filler music and glitchy sound samples. Made in collaboration with Deb Never, Smyth describes the song as having, ‘this alternative side to it. The production team fleshed out the feeling, and the lyrics just came out. Then me and Debs went on a night out after that. It’s one of those tracks I don’t listen to too much, to be honest, because whenever I do, it perpetuates me going out on a sesh.’
The unabashed energy of ‘Picking Up’, a heart-racer of a song that’ll set festival crowds alight, is only one part of the alchemy of performing. ‘The art of energy in a gig is super important. I want the same feeling to happen in a night-time slot and a daytime slot. A good set works anywhere. The set just now starts summery then goes into a darker mood; things get a bit heavier in the older tracks. And then it picks up around tracks four or five, before ending in total party mode.’
Biig Piig, Royal Highland Showgrounds, 26 August; Connect runs 25–27 August.