In a digital world, two blinks, i love you is thriving in analog

“two blinks, i love you came at the right time,” Brown says as he reflects on closing the chapter on pizzagirl and opening a new one with two blinks. Shedding his old skin, transitioning from his first musical alias to the next left him hopeful, finally, for his creative future.

The Liverpool-based musician jumped into music in high school so he could play with his friends, who were all playing guitar at the time. When he first started playing, Brown was the drummer of the group, but he eventually picked up guitar by the time that all his friends were done playing the instrument. He started his first project, pizzagirl, when he was seventeen years old, describing it as a “fun” and “internet-based” project rooted in the bedroom indie-pop sound.

Brown released a number of albums and EPs under that first moniker but ultimately decided to part ways with it, a past self he no longer resonated with and start a new musical journey as two blinks, i love you. “I equate it to carrying around a picture of yourself when you were fifteen years old for years and you just become sick and embarrassed of it. While I’m not embarrassed about it now, I was getting to the point where I wasn’t really happy about the idea of being called ‘pizzagirl’ at thirty,” Brown explains.

The two blinks projects, then, could not have been a more welcome opposite. Where pizzagirl was digital, online, wired into the matrix, internet doom scrolling, two blinks, i love you is analogue, earnest, rough around the edges, and focused on keen observations of the outside world.

Indeed, with two blinks, Brown has allowed him to step into sounds he’s admired since the beginning. Rather than focusing on late 2010s indie-pop, he’s pulling from greats like The Smiths, Moldy Peaches, Elliott Smith, and New York’s antifolk and indie-sleaze movements to create some of his most earnest work to date.

“I’m frankensteining these two worlds together with something that's a bit unique to me but hopefully familiar to the listener,” Brown says of his new sound, particularly on his latest work, ep 2. “It’s hard to discipline yourself and know which is the right thing to go for. One day I’ll write a super energetic guitar song and the next I'm writing a very intimate acoustic folk EP for myself.”

“I can see the project (two blinks, i love you) live a longer life because there is so much to say about life in these types of songs rather than pizzagirl being a bit more tongue and cheek and wrapped in metaphors,” Brown explains. The name for the project, as he says, is an immediate indication of this switch-up. “It's a long-winded thing to be writing out but I like the fact that ‘I love you’ is in the name because there's not many times you see a band name with ‘I love you’ in it. It’s a constant outpour of positivity for people even if you don’t listen to the music.” As Brown tells it, the name originated from a memory of a moment with a lost loved one. Naming this project after them, he said, felt like the best way to keep them and his connection to them alive. In many ways, this is just the beauty of Brown’s latest chapter. Rather than trying to embody a fictional character, all Brown is trying to do now is wear his own heart on his sleeve.

The goal for the music, as a result, is to make art that’s timeless, something that connects. Brown admires and pulls from acts like The Smiths so much because of the way their work endures, how you can listen to them at any stage of your life and keep coming back to it. That, he says, is where he hopes this new project can go. “There’s something super attractive about making music that stands the test of time regardless of adolescence or adulthood,” Brown says.

“Music is my process of understanding the world, the way I'm living it and my relationships with people and the world around me. Music is kind of a way of quantifying it in some ways,” he admits. Everything, he says, can be incorporated into his songs. He’s just letting himself be open to life and its experiences. Little moments, new cities, and even Sofia Coppola’s ‘Lost in Translation’ are all fair game for him now. “Sometimes I’ll make a demo of a song and cross-reference it to a ‘Lost in Translation’ edit to see how it fits,” he confesses. Where his teenage years and the pizzagirl era were marked by stressing over “finding himself” and getting everything “just right,” Brown has now realized those things only come from staying open and letting himself be inspired.

Writing at four in the morning, for example, is not atypical for him. Late in the night, Brown says, “you become more tolerant to the ideas of being more honest with yourself. I think in the daytime and being in public you have this shield up and you’re more objective about the world but past 11 pm at night you become more subjective. It’s like maybe I want these things but I’d be too embarrassed to talk about them perhaps.”

On “the coldest winter ever,” his latest release featuring fellow Liverpool musician Tonia, Brown tells a love story blossoming in the winter. The single came from another one of Brown’s late-night writes. It was, as he calls it, “bread from a lack of sleep and disdain for Christmas.” The idea that there's a love song based on the conditions of this time of year which is brutal, unloving, and unforgiving, I think it's nice to have that group of ideas together,” Brown explains.

When it came to his Brown’s recent project, ep 2, New York City was perhaps his biggest reference point. The New York he is referring to, though, is the indie sleeze, the early 2000s, meet me in the bathroom type of New York. The sound are that legendary Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem vibe. “I’ve always been drawn to it, its very tape machine, two mics and it feels very accessible to me. Rather than being into classic rock where the production is crystal clear, there’s so much heart in these bands and it's hard for me to not reference or pay respects to that sound,” says Brown. “New York for me is kind of a melting pot of all my favourite films, music, and art. It’s almost written in the stars that this band sounds the way it does.”

With his new work rolling out steadily, the only thing left for Brown to do is share it. He’s already got one date under his belt – a gig at the Hyde Park Book Club – but he says he’s ready for more. “I’m looking forward to making a world on stage that people can connect to,” he says.