If anyone can lift us out of the gloom, it's Little Mix.
Britain's most successful girl band are breaking through the fug of self-isolation with a turbo-charged new single that goes by the self-explanatory title Break Up Song.
It was written in a flurry of creativity last year - one of seven songs the band composed in a single day with their go-to writer (and former stockbroker) Camille Purcell.
Straight away, it was earmarked as the first single on Little Mix's sixth album, which is also their first since splitting from Simon Cowell's record label, Syco, in 2018.
Plans for the album are up in the air after the coronavirus outbreak put recording sessions on hold - but they decided to release Break Up Song anyway, in an attempt to keep their fans happy in uncertain times.Singer Perrie Edwards joined us on the phone from her house in London to explain what's going on; and how the split from Syco has given Little Mix permission to go back to their first love: pure, unfiltered, hands-in-the-air pop anthems.
So basically, the story goes like this…
Sometimes when we do writing sessions you're literally sat there, twiddling your thumbs, doodling on a piece of paper, pretending you're coming up with ideas while you're secretly going on Uber and ordering yourself a car home.
Then there's other days when everything is flowing and it feels amazing. And this was one of those days. We went in the studio with Camille, who's like the fifth member of Little Mix, and we wrote about six or seven songs in one day.
All completed, polished songs?
Well, it was everything from rough ideas to little tiny demos, and one of them was Break Up Song.
It was very basic at the time. The beat was all over the place and it was really, really rough - but it just had something about it. And we thought, "This has got to be the first single. Let's just bin everything we thought of doing before and roll with this."
So it wasn't always destined to be the lead single?
No, but we played the demo to our label and said, "This is going to be a smash - we just need to finish it."
And they were going, "How can you tell it's going to be a hit when it's literally just a verse and the [main] line?"
And we were like, "Trust us. Let us get a really good demo together, and we'll present it to you and see what you think". And as soon as we did that, everybody loved it. We felt really proud because it was our baby.
I've always wondered how you divide up the singing in the studio. Do you each have specific strengths you play to?
Back in the day we used to have a routine about who sang what but, since the last album, it's become almost a free-for-all.
Like, I got to the stage where I was like, "Guys, I really don't want to belt out the big notes and the ad-libs all the time. I want to sing a verse, or something lower [in pitch] because I like to sing low as well".
So we throw it all over the place now. I think it keeps it more exciting for us and the fans.
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