Atwood Magazine’s own Frederick Bloy – one half of the London-based independent art rock duo, Idiotwin – shares a brief, thoughtful reflection on the lessons learned and perspectives gained on the road to independently releasing an album in 2025 – from the creative process to the marketing journey and beyond.

Stream: ‘Idiotwin’ LP – Idiotwin

A prominent worry when creating art is not so much the process, or the potential tribulations of fame, or the ravaging realities of such aspirations.

I have heard it said a few times before, without being able to currently recall the author, that the ideal scenario is to have an audience spend longer digesting your art, than it took you to make it.

This can be quite tricky.

Certain films are postponed several times. Certain large-scale paintings are multi-year long feats of endurance and refinement. But what of a song? Songwriting is difficult to summarise within a set metric. Certain compositions move through multiple demos and drafts. Then there’s the mixing and mastering. And what of the conceptual window, where lyrics and motifs coalesce and coerce before the shape of a song is even tangible?

For my band Idiotwin, the realisation of a full, debut LP has taken just shy of two years, if you start measuring time from the band’s public existence and EP release. It’s even longer if you start from the conceptual writing stages before that. You could even go back to when I was in secondary school, having written what is now the LP’s opening track at sixteen.

I wanted to share my experiences as an independent musician having worked on, and now releasing a debut LP. I hope that, stripped from the record labels, the agents, the European tours, and the hundreds of thousands of likes on social media, such a perspective can be a refreshing one.

Whether or not this article helps tally up a listening time for the LP longer than it took to create is debatable, and not necessarily my concern either. What does concern me, is my sharing with you how it came to be, how I felt about it before, and I how I feel about it now as we (at the time of writing) approach its release on the 21^st March.

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The Writing Process

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@duncan.reviews, a ludicrously voracious and impressively eloquent music-reviewer (my personal favourite of the bunch), when reviewing Idiotwin’s EP, led with the tagline, ‘a high-budget puppet show with a mastermind pulling the strings.’

Apart from being a glowing compliment, I found the idea of an Idiotwin release being perceived as ‘high-budget’ as intriguing. All of Idiotwin’s music has been recorded and produced between two houses in London, through a Focusrite Scarlett interface (the independent musician’s best friend) and, primarily, a USB Marantz microphone purchased through Amazon. The most expensive thing about Idiotwin’s music is, either, the accumulated travel costs of two bandmates zipping across London for weekly rehearsals, or the oboe owned by one of its members.

Any illusion of grand expense is likely a result of the sound we wanted to achieve. As a duo, we find ourselves pulling from a sprawling array of influences, so we tend to genre-hop. This being said, if I were to pick any overarching genres, I would opt for art rock and chamber pop. These are genres that champion instrumentation, journey, and breadth of timbre and sonority. I think with independent artists, the default position is a scruffiness or low-fidelity that permeates a handful of concise tracks. There are reams of cloud rap singles, lo-fi beats or hazy bedroom pop EPs to exemplify this. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, none of that music is lazy or artistically stunted – it’s simply that Idiotwin wanted to sound, for want of better description, big and varied.

We prioritise layers, is something I’ve realised. There is never just one guitar – I purposefully wrote riffs on my electric that burst, just for a moment, to bolster the cacophony of noisy shoegaze moments, or spindly fingerstyle arpeggios on an acoustic (with far too high an action) to ripple as gossamer counter-melodies. More noticeably, Idiotwin are blessed to have two members who are comfortable singing. We take immense pride over the stacked vocal harmonies that quickly became integral to our personal sound.

Effectively, what I’m trying to demonstrate is that ‘big-budget’ music can be created out of meagre provisions. At no point was a studio rented, for instance. One of the best pieces of music advice I have ever received is how crucial it is it ‘write something you would enjoy listening to’. As long as you never lose the ability to judge your own music against such a litmus test, any quality of sound, I believe, is achievable. Undoubtedly, it might mean our next release takes a couple of years, instead of five months, but it will be worth it.

I’d like to make two more short points on the writing of independent music. Firstly, the length of time it takes to actually make a song. What must never be undermined if working in a partnership, or in tandem with a group of any size, is communication and trust. Both of Idiotwin’s members have known each other for years. I know that Chris is very content to wait for me to send over the skeleton of a song I’ve taken a month to ideate – he trusts me enough to leave me to work and update him accordingly. With no pressure from a record label, this allows us to write with liberation. Songs can materialise and evolve unforced, unfettered. A song like ‘And Then There Was The Time it Came Down in Droves’ took some time to construct. ‘Happiest in the Room (The Birthday Song)’ was written in one night. There is no sense of schedule whatsoever, aside from any pressure you may exert on yourself.

Secondly, I am not a producer, nor do I know much at all about production. I am consistently indebted to Chris not just for his capability as a producer, but ingenious expertise and creativity. Our process has very often been that I will write the song, send all the parts over, provide guidance on the final sound, and then like the shifting of tectonic plates, wake up one morning to discover that things around me have transformed. Again, no excessive funding was splurged on mixing and mastering, but it is raw conscientiousness and pragmatism that makes the music sound good. I have discovered through this process that what is much more useful than speaking in riddles about how I envisage songs sounding, is providing reference tracks. That might be the most important lesson I’ve learned.

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The Publicity Process

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I think every independent musician would agree with this – the writing of the music is the fun part.

The worth of a musician is the competence with which they compose melody, order harmony, and appeal to universal experience through their lyrics. Marketing, self-promotion and networking are not as innate a skillset, nor are they past-times necessarily revelled in. I could spend a very long time lamenting the hindrances of social media and streaming platforms for the musician that craves recognition, or the most nominal commercial nudge. However, I think most people have some grasp on how untenably challenging it is to rival the giants of commercial pop, nepotism, and the like. I do not want to talk about this. It would make for a draining write, and a suffocating read. Independent musicians create simply for the love of creation. If an Idiotwin song can connect to any one person that is not obliged to me in any way, as far as I’m concerned, I’m winning.

However, I would never create for a vacuum. I’ve worked very hard to build a network for Idiotwin, and I think we’re building relationships as reliable, but also impressively unique musicians. As a result, we are attaining regular gigs across London (I would implore you to look at my ‘Sounds From the Ground’ series, which discusses independent music across the city, from the perspective of a performer). I think gigs are a must for any musician. To any artist reading this, I would encourage you to commit to the phone calls, emails, and legwork of meeting people and visiting venues. Promoters and bookers do just want to put on shows, and if you can guarantee an audience for your slot, you’re in. As long as you’re amicable thereafter, you might even be invited back.

This is how, in short, Idiotwin finds itself inexorably returning to The Spice of Life in Soho. It was there that I told an audience for the first time about the release of our LP. They cheered. They were excited for us. People came up afterwards and asked me to remind them of the date. Strangers, with no prior attachment to Idiotwin were excited by the prospect of an Idiotwin LP.

Is that because we’re exceptional live? Maybe, I could not say. I think it’s more so the fact that people who attend independent music shows are, on average, there exclusively for independent music. Those audiences will understand the trepidation of a smaller act looking to accrue engagement for their art that they have worked doggedly at. My point is that support is out there, if you look for it.

We have also tried the social media ‘thing’. We’ve made several posts teasing the LP release date as if some clandestine, acroamatic cult deadline. I thoroughly enjoy the content we’ve produced – I think it’s well-made. To this day I haven’t been able to crack the algorithms, so have no profound insight on how to get trending with startling rapidity, but if it looks good, and is released regularly, you cannot do much more. At the very least, I’m sure it’s given our close friends a chuckle.

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Independent music can be daunting.

Like a child endeavouring to walk, one step might be manageable, but a second one, at least at the start, is an exertion too far. A staircase to a toddler must look like Kilimanjaro. For the artists recording final fingerstyle arpeggios in their bedroom, the stratospheric fame of a Glastonbury stage cannot be allowed to taunt you. It is a noble goal, but an LP release is a sparkling achievement that gets you closer to that than before.

So, I would ask every independent artist, simply, to keep creating. Show your friends and family what you have made with unabashed pride. Celebrate your work – lose yourself on the stage of a fifty-capacity venue for half an hour, schedule a listening party for an EP; never forget why you love the thing you do.

That love is why you started, and that love pushes us to keep trying, to keep creating. It gets mountaineers to the top of Kilimanjaro, but not without starting at the bottom first.

The Idiotwin LP released on 21^st March 2025 and is out now! Give it a listen if you’re interested; I think it’s pretty good.

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:: stream/purchase Idiotwin here ::

:: connect with Idiotwin here ::

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Stream: ‘Idiotwin’ LP – Idiotwin

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 © Paloma White

Idiotwin

an album by Idiotwin