Good Neighbours’ rise has been nothing short of meteoric. Since breaking out with their viral hit Home, the duo of Oli Fox and Scott Verrill have gone from TikTok buzz to Brit Award nominees in just over a year. Their debut album Blue Sky Mentality channels that momentum into a collection of expansive indie-pop anthems that balance raw emotion with widescreen optimism. Written between tour buses, festival stages and late-night studio sessions, the record dives into themes of friendship, grief, love and resilience. To celebrate its release, the band take us inside each track and the stories that brought it to life.

Keep it up

This song was kind of the inception of our band. Maybe the second time we had written freely in a way that we never had before. I (Oli) had actually just been fired from my part-time job at the time and was in a panicky place, not knowing how I was gonna get by. I went into the studio where Scott had been looping the chords around, I grabbed the mic and started off with this emphatic sort of cry for help energy, which soon became the choru s.We then kinda stumbled upon this blue sky mentality way of treating our mundane problems by producing them up in an optimistic way. It felt like good neighbours was born that day.

Skipping stones

Again, a really early song in the album writing; Skipping Stones was written off the back of Keep It Up. We wanted to talk about the aspirations that felt a little foolish to have whilst we still needed to work for the man. It’s also maybe the first time we flexed a more producer-y side of us, chopping a bunch of samples and going in on some fun synth patches made for a real interesting record on this one.

Ripple

Ripple came from an interesting place. I’d been speaking to my best mate, who had just lost his dad, and was like a second dad to me. I knew I wanted to try and visually frame grief so I could try to empathise with him. He spoke about feeling like he was weighing me down every time he spoke about his dad, and it became clear that this image of grief was this underwater drowning feeling. So I grabbed the nylon guitar and made a scratch version of the song; it had all the heart but no real twist. Scott took the song and flipped the beat on its head, and made it almost like dancey and in walked our good neighbours’ formula of framing a tough problem in a positive light.

Found u/me

This track was a bit of a Hail Mary for the album. We were writing on an off day with our mate Pablo for album 2 ideas, but then this one felt so fitting for the current album. It was a song where we started it in the room but finished across WhatsApp just bouncing vocal ideas off of each other, till we found a formula that worked. The main struggle with choruses like this is finding verses that set it up, but after a lot of back and forth, we’re proud of this one.

Walk Walk Walk

This is one of our few writing collaborations on the album- we wrote it in LA with pop legend Justin Tranter. He’s someone we’ve always dreamed of working with – and we learnt a bunch from it. One of our fave things about the sessions with Justin was how deep his musical knowledge is, it’s easy to pin him in as a pop god, but we bonded over a bunch of early 2000s indie bands before we wrote this. It’s also nice to have a big riff in this song as a nice little nod to those MGMT era tunes. 

Kids Can’t Sleep

We made this at a weird time because we had just gotten to LA as the wildfires were all happening, and the whole city was basically on lockdown. We felt a bit weird about even being there, so we just locked ourselves away and made this. It kind of came from a place of being cooped up and having a lot of pent-up energy/anxiety, hence why it’s one of the quicker songs on the album.

Home

Feel like we’ve said all we can say about this song, but we owe everything to it. When we first wrote it, I remember we felt confident about it being a good song, but not like a “hit”, so it was quite funny to see it go viral. It’s the reason we get to write and record this album, the reason we’re on the road playing to people on the other side of the world. A real life changer..

Small Town

This was a track we had in our original demos folder before everything took off. We loved it straight away because it always felt like the opening sequence for our own coming of age movie – it sets the scene so well with some warm, big and nostalgic synths, and then it just gradually builds bigger and bigger. It had been a while since we’d heard those American-sounding M83-esque synths. That coming of age inspired the original idea of writing about breaking out of a small town and yearning for more, something we both went through.

Starry Eyed

Probably the easiest song for us – both in writing and to listen to. We made this whilst on tour with Foster The People this year, when we had a pretty low-pressure day with our uber-talented friend Joe Janiak in LA, who played some of his wacky instruments, and this fell out. It was all spurred from playing the chords on a nylon-strung banjo – then the rest all came out pretty much in the hour. The hardest thing with Starry Eyed was simplifying it – not overproducing and letting it be a more organic-sounding record for the album. 

People Need People

I remember having the title before this song, which is always a relieving place to start for writing because you can’t really go wrong. We’d been in the pub with our mates and had all been looking at our overdrafts, being like “what are we doing with our lives?” But our group has always had a great way of filling in for each other and listening to each other’s problems, the support was great. I’d been listening to a lot of Motown at the time, so I was really keen on getting the vocals super stacked and reverby to get across that sense of community you feel in the lyrics. We sat on the demo for a while and only finished it fairly recently at the beginning of 2025, when we added a more committed drum part and some lovely synths from Studio 13.

Left Hand Man

To be honest, Left Hand Man was a moment for us to breathe – both from a writing perspective and also how it breaks up the album. We had been non-stop and took a writing trip to Cornwall in England – nothing was really coming, and we just ended up making this weird guitar riff interlude thing that ended up as a beautiful little moment on the album. We needed to let our brains relax and take some pressure off to write the album, and this did that. 

Suburbs

We love this song, but it went on a long journey to get to this version – we went through like 15 different versions so it took a while for us to unlearn it and fall back in love with it! It goes hand in hand with Small Town and sums up the story behind the album perfectly- two boys trying aiming for the moon and pushing past the doubts holding you back. The verse is rammed with lyrics, but I think they’re some of the best in the album. ‘You could put your ceiling on the county lines and sit upon the sparks till they’re gone’ is such a cool way of basically saying ‘get up and do something about it before you’re stuck’. 

Wonderful Life

Similar to Keep It Up, this song was written in a slightly up and down period before Good Neighbours was on its way. It’s about rolling with the punches and coming up smiling. Almost playing dumb to the weight of the world. I feel like that’s how we want people to feel after they’ve heard the song; to feel like their problems are minimised. We were listening to a bunch of Arcade Fire at the time and loved the wall of sound they created, so we tried that approach in order to create that sense of feeling small and almost unimportant.

The Buzz

Super proud of this record. We wrote this with the lovely Phil Plested. After listening to where we were at with the album, we realised we hadn’t even tried for a ballad, which felt ludicrous coming from two boys who live for the sad track on an album. It’s a song about yearning for a feeling that may or may not have left your last love. It was real nice to just sit and write this over the piano and keep it as basic as possible to keep the lyrics at the forefront.

Blue Sky Mentality is out now, follow via @wearegoodneighbours