With releases on Liquicity, Blackout Music and Global League, Aussie DnB duo V O E have been making serious waves across 2020. As the year draws to a yawning close, they add another name to that illustrious collection with ‘Giants’, their monstrous new release on YouTube goliath NCS.
A rock-infused roller with a roaring double topline, jagged guitars, snarling synths and mammoth depth drops, ‘Giants’ not only caught the attention of the NCS A&R team but also bagged the pair top spot on the hotly contested Track And Build 2.0 competition in association with Jagermeister, Koven and LabelRadar.
Scheduled to feature on the soundtrack for upcoming game Wreck Out, the track was born out of the all-too-familiar curse of 3am writer’s block, as one half of the band Tom Calvett, explained: “I was feeling inspired when I started but all my ideas just weren’t working, I was feeling that frustration and writer’s block. I went back to basics which for me is just a piano and just trying to sing, that’s my favourite way to come up with ideas, and that’s where ‘Giants’ came to life. The whole story of ‘Giants’ is based on the emotions I was feeling at the time,” he went on, “which was my drive for music and for us as artists trying to reach the top, reach out goals. That’s where the first lyric “Where am I going, I’m falling over dreams” came from. It was how I was feeling at the time but it slowly turned around and it’s like, I know what I’m doing, I know what I want to be, I’m climbing these vines to the giants – the artists that we idolise and the labels as well. Working towards NCS is absolutely huge.”
Track And Build 2.0 built on the huge success of 2019’s inaugural competition and drew in a slew of entries from music producers and game creators from all corners of the world. V O E’s winning submission, which gained them mentorship from London-based game soundtrack specialists Koven, will be released on NCS as a stand alone single on December 4th and then as part of a wider EP featuring competition runners up on December 18th.
Discussing why V O E’s track in particular caught the ears and musical taste buds of Track And Build 2.0 judges, James Foster, one of the heads behind the project said: “We hear a lot of music especially within the remit of Track and Build, this year we had over 650 submissions – that’s a lot to get through. It takes something special for records stick out of the pack these days and that’s definitely what happened with V O E. Production as a whole has gone up across the board in the past few years but even within the initial 20 second preview we get via Label Radar we knew that there was more to these guys”.
