THE ESSENCE OF BIFFY CLYRO

On their 10th album, Futique, one of Britain's biggest rock bands emerge from a rough patch with startling clarity and a new mantra: “Let Biffy be Biffy!”

- WILL RICHARDS

Let Biffy be Biffy.” That was the mantra Scottish trio Biffy Clyro repeated to themselves while making their 10th studio album, Futique. For the preceding few years, the band - frontman Simon Neil and brothers Ben and James Johnston - had found it a little harder to just, well... be Biffy.

Being ‘Biffy’ has meant many different things since the band formed in Kilmarnock in the mid-1990s. The band spent their first decade together making intriguingly weird yet powerful music that attracted a fiercely dedicated cult fanbase that still exists to this day.

It was with 2007's Puzzle that the band hit the mainstream, turning some of their sharper and more obscure edges into enormous pop choruses destined for arenas and festival main stages (Simon calls that time “a turning point for our ambition”). The album was written just after his mother - a self-confessed hater of her son’s band’s music up to that point - had passed away. “I remember very clearly thinking after that, ‘I want my music to be for as many people as possible,” Simon says.

From that moment, and through the series of chart-topping albums that followed, Biffy’s music did duly become for everybody — including The X Factor's Matt Cardle, who won the 2010 edition of the show with ‘When We Collide’, a cover of Biffy’s ‘Many of Horror’. Consistent sold-out arena tours and headline slots at Reading & Leeds, Download and more followed, with Biffy now firmly part of the furniture of the British rock scene and one of the genre’s biggest bands of the 21st century.

While the world outside the band maintained a strong sense of what Biffy Clyro were, things inside the camp became a little muddier. Looking back, the titles of their dual lockdown-era albums - A Celebration of Endings and