The angel number 1111 symbolises enlightenment and awakening. In numerology, it’s considered divine confirmation that things are on the right path. That feeling is one that Biig Piig arrived at after a long period of constant flux. It also provides the title and emotional bedrock of her highly-anticipated debut album 11:11, which finds the Irish pop star “a bit more at peace with the ebbs and flows of life.”
The angel number 1111 symbolises enlightenment and awakening. In numerology, it’s considered divine confirmation that things are on the right path. That feeling is one that Biig Piig arrived at after a long period of constant flux. It also provides the title and emotional bedrock of her highly-anticipated debut album 11:11, which finds the Irish pop star “a bit more at peace with the ebbs and flows of life.”
“Whenever I check my phone and it’s 11:11, I always take a moment to think about someone that I know, or reflect on an experience, or take a moment of gratitude,” she explains. “I feel like it's always a nice time to take a step back, and this record has felt like that too. It’s one big reflection on everything that's happened the last few years.”
Biig Piig is a queen of reinvention. At 26-years-old, she’s lived countless lives in countless cities, from her birthplace of Cork, to Marbella, London, and Los Angeles. She’s worked all kinds of unusual jobs, from dealing poker at Leicester Square’s Empire Casino to working in a draft house after a stint at “Beer School”, and babysitting for a family in Switzerland for two months. That same lawless spirit has driven Biig Piig’s musical identity, including her name. It started off as a joke – something she’d read on a pizza menu – but the more it stuck around the more it came to mirror her lifestyle: “The big pig… the big mess,” as she put it in one early interview. “But in a way, that’s the sweetest thing.”
It’s also driven the music itself, from the bilingual bars she dropped over sleek alt hip-hop instrumentals with the London-based DIY collective NiNE8, to the global mix of R&B, dance, and neo-soul that runs through her first run of EPs, starting with 2018’s excellently-titled Big Fan of the Sesh. From there, she’s experimented with laid-back trap beats and Spanish love songs on 2019’s A World Without Snooze and No Place for Patience, and introspective alt-indie on 2021’s The Sky is Bleeding. Acting as a stepping stone towards 11:11, her acclaimed 2023 mixtape Bubblegum probed themes of self-discovery, loneliness and longing in the wake of her move to L.A – a city that can be dreamlike and disorienting in equal measure. It also refined Biig Piig’s sound, coalescing into an immersive body of buoyant dance-pop with a confessional flair.
Recorded in various studios across London and Paris, including the late Philippe Zdar’s iconic Motorbass, 11:11 took shape as Biig Piig began to settle down. She returned to London where she now lives full-time with her two cats, she’s in her “first long long-term relationship,” she’s putting roots down. This is the position from which her first full-length body of work was created. No longer moving at high speed but still feeling things intensely, 11:11 makes peace with change as a constant, rather than trying to outrun it. “I was having a really hard time at some points, but in hindsight everything has happened the way it was supposed to,” she reflects on the writing process and personal changes running alongside it. “It’s those moments that have influenced [the record], and tie back to that same feeling that I get when I see the number 1111.”
Opening track “4AM” begins Biig Piig’s new chapter at its messy conclusion, sorting through the aftermath of a big night out. Starting with the bittersweet lyric “Oh you could have hit me with the bad news first,” the verses cast their net into the past, contemplating relationships with the self, with substances, and with partners. Then the chorus bursts forward like an uplifting mantra: “I know you don’t want to be alone / ‘Cause no one does.” That hope, she says, is “something I wanted people to hear and feel, because I know that I needed to hear it throughout this process.” With euphoric club sounds washing like waves over the kind of thumping rhythm that has even the club toilet stalls vibrating, it’s the perfect song to introduce an album that encourages us to celebrate all textures of life – rough parts and all.
The album’s 11 tracks are accompanied by 11 short films, written by Biig Piig, which follow five characters who each represent a different dimension of the album. Ranging from falling in love for the first time to feeling adrift in a new city, each track provides a different angle on intimacy and growth. With breathy vocals, a funky bass line, and a rib-rattling electro backbone, “Decimal” captures the feeling of locking eyes with a stranger across a dancefloor. It was made in Paris with producer Andrew Wells (Chappell Roan, Halsey, Bebe Rexha), and is inspired by clubbing to such an extent that it’s quite literally built around movement. To find the right tempo, Wells took down the pace of Biig Piig strutting across the studio. “I really wanted to capture that connection,” she says. “When the walls are sweating and you see someone and you just feel electric to them.”
The album is inspired by club culture in general, which she has always associated with safety and freedom of expression ever since she started going to jungle raves in her teens. Listening to a lot of Goldfrapp, Vendredi sur Mer, and French electro house around the time of writing 11:11, she felt driven to make a record that “feels good in a room.” Unsurprisingly, given its geographic roots, the album is laced with the influence of nightlife in Paris and London.
The free flowing and open-hearted nature of Paris comes through on the dizzy “9-5,” which was made with Wells at Motorbass and bottles the seemingly limitless energy that comes with falling in love – with a person, a city, a state of mind. “It’s so happy and so chilled,” she says of the track. “I was experiencing Montmartre for the first time and I just fell in love with the place. I was going out and meeting people and having a great time, playing music on the streets... I was also at a really nice stage in my relationship. That song just flowed out of me.”
The more impulsive and harder-edged energy of London can be felt in the rushing heartbeat of “Cynical,” which is made for those evenings that start in one place and end in another three days later, and the yearning pulse of “Ponytail,” which is about the toxic parts of a relationship. “Feeling tied to someone and wanting to break the cycle but not being able to and kind of admitting defeat,” she adds of “Ponytail,” which was made with longtime collaborator Mac Wetha. “It’s also masked in a very dancey package, so it’s a bit of a sad banger. Crying at the club: my favourite thing to do!”
Elsewhere tracks like “Favourite Girl” are more cerebral, abandoning the dancefloor to explore the realm of imagination. “Come take all my love,” she flirts over a rubbery instrumental that evokes a Barbie-esque world of bold colours and synthetic textures. “Sometimes I’m inspired by going out, but sometimes it’s pure fantasy. It’s like daydreaming – you’re writing to manifest, almost.” Meanwhile, the stripped-back “One Way Ticket” says a tender goodbye to a family friend, taking stock through their words of encouragement (“If you could see me now / I know that you’d say ‘I told ya’”). “I guess it was just trying to get past that stage of grief, when things are happening in life and you're just a bit like… I wish that you were here to see it,” she says. “It feels like I’m talking to that person, almost, through that track.”
While the subject matter is deeply personal, meditating on the full breadth of the human experience from love to loss, 11:11 is intended to be experienced collectively. Its sinewy beats and sun-kissed 808s provide the dancefloor, and the lyrics invite you onto it by baring it all. There, in the rhythmic embrace of the music, worry melts down into a bonding agent. That communal spirit is baked into the album’s DNA. If “Stay Home” sounds like a breezy jam around an open fire, that’s because it basically is – the track was recorded in a pub, with loads of her friends and family joining in for its sing-along second half. “It was such a nice thing to be able to have them on the record. I've always wanted to be able to look back on my first album and have it honour all the people that made me who I am today,” she says.
11:11 exudes a cool confidence that has come from the wear and tear of life experience. Lyrically, Biig Piig plays the role of the older sister who’s been through it all and is wiser for it, but still there in the trenches with you – because how much can any of us have it all figured out, anyway? Sonically, the tracks have also benefited from a different kind of nerve in her own songwriting. There was more jamming, more redrafting, more walking away and coming back to the tracks on 11:11 compared to previous projects. “It's been a long time coming to a point where I'm ready to release a full album. With previous projects, it felt like five or six tracks was all they wanted to be. Whereas this felt like it wanted to go on a little bit longer, and we let the tracks grow a lot more,” she explains. “I’ve been a lot more secure in feeling like I’m not going to lose a song by letting it breathe.”
“I think I’ve grown up a lot in the last few years. It's been a lot of chaotic times, but I think I’ve come to a point where I feel like I've met myself,” she adds. It only made sense, then, for that sentiment to close out the album. Providing the end credits with a flurry of brass and a kicked-back beat that recalls chirping birds and 6AM cigarettes, “Brighter Day” leaves us with a message of perseverance. While writing it, she pictured an image of the sun rising. “I’m watching it all fade away and being like… Ok, we’re still here. We made it out the other end.”
Making its way through the outer havoc of the storm to its peaceful eye, 11:11 finds hope in the dark and confidence through endurance. “I'd love for people to feel nostalgic for experiences they've had. To be able to reflect on them, and celebrate them, and let them go through the music,” she says. “It’s about letting go of past things and loving yourself through the hard times – and having a good time, too, because that's what we're all here for.”
