Using only two voices and two guitars, Alice Costelloe and Kacey Underwood create music that’s unfettered by the constraints of a traditional band. Their sound is gauzy but spartan; his vocal, dusky, hers crystalline, twinned in a spectral haze. From the first song they ever wrote together, the distractedly sweet ‘Homework’, to the celestial drift of ‘Pi’ Big Deal’s music is unflinchingly honest, powerful in its intimacy and quivering with the intensity of a first crush.

They come from two different worlds – Costelloe from an artistic London household, while Underwood was born into a strict religious family in the desert between Joshua Tree and the Yucca Valley. When Costelloe was 14 she played guitar in her first band; when Underwood was the same age, he found escape in music. Records were his key to freedom from the rules that surrounded him. He immersed himself in Metallica, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Depeche Mode and taught himself to play on a guitar he found under his brother’s bed. 

Where so many bands rely on and hide behind onstage strut and pomp, amps-up-to-eleven, swathes of reverb and other expected performance pieces, Big Deal’s live shows are hard hitting in their restraint. Their stripped back, bedroom-composed pop songs and the duo’s clear chemistry are so mesmeric that a hush instantly descends on any audience, with those assembled eager to take in every nuance in their entwined voices, every lilt and lyrical twist. With one acoustic and one electric guitar, their songs carry an instant connection and while their performance is inclusive, it also leaves you with the sense that you’ve been privy to a secret exchange.

Big Deal have Lights Out co-produced by Underwood and Dean Reid. The duo recorded 15 tracks in just seven days, and the result is a cohesive, deeply personal and simultaneously universal collection. From the nostalgic sweep of ‘Distant Neighborhood’, to the deeply reflective 'Seraphine’, to the raw confessional ‘Talk’.