Bicep are a Belfast electronic duo, Andy Ferguson and Matt McBriar, who make emotional, melancholic house and breakbeat. Their best-known track is 2017’s “Glue.” That’s the short version. The longer version is that nostalgia is the easiest drug to sell and the hardest to do well, and Bicep are one of the only acts who actually weaponize it instead of just selling it.
Most people who reach for nostalgia slap a tape-hiss filter on a four-chord loop and call it a mood. Bicep do the opposite: they build the ache into the architecture. Two guys from Belfast figured out how to make you homesick for places you’ve never been. They’ve been doing it for years, and they started without touching a synth at all.
It started as a blog
Feel My Bicep launched in 2008, back in the blog-house era, when finding music meant actually reading some obsessive’s website. It began as two childhood friends living in different cities trading tunes, and turned into a public stream of forgotten Italo, house and disco edits posted with real context. That matters, because it means they listened to thousands of records before they made one. When they finally started producing, they weren’t guessing at what a great house track felt like. They’d catalogued it. The whole Bicep sound is basically a record collection that learned to write its own songs.
“Glue” (2017)
Then “Glue” happened. If you only know one Bicep track, it’s that one, and there’s a reason. Those chords come in and something in your chest does a thing it didn’t agree to. It’s built off a breathy vocal loop that sounds like it’s grieving and dancing at the same time, sitting over a breakbeat that wants to keep moving even though the melody clearly wants to lie down on the floor. It’s the rare club track that works at 2am in a sweaty room and at 8am on the train home when the night’s over and you’re emotionally destroyed. That dual citizenship, euphoria and loss in the same four bars, is the entire Bicep thesis in one track.
Isles (2021)
The 2017 self-titled debut on Ninja Tune was the proof of concept. 2021’s Isles is where they got ruthless about it. “Apricots” stitches a Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir sample to a 1958 Hugh Tracey field recording of Malawian singers, and the result feels ancient and synthetic at once. “Saku” with Clara La San is the closest they’ve come to a straight pop song, and it still aches. The whole record leans into that rave-melancholy lane: the sound of remembering a warehouse that’s since been turned into luxury flats. It’s nostalgia for the act of going out, made by two guys old enough to remember when going out felt like it mattered more.
Rave-melancholy isn’t sad music
Here’s what people miss about the rave-melancholy tag: it’s not sad music. It’s music that knows joy is temporary and decides to feel it harder because of that. The melancholy is the price of admission for the euphoria, and Bicep charge it up front so the highs hit cleaner. That’s a more honest emotional contract than most dance music offers. Most of it just promises you’ll feel good forever, which is a lie, and your body knows it’s a lie by 4am.
The live show
Bicep live is not two guys pressing play. It’s a reworked set, tracks broken down and re-sequenced, wrapped in visuals that turn the music into weather: light that breathes with the kick drum, abstract shapes that feel like they’re remembering something. The move that kills is the wait. They’ll let a room full of people who came for “Glue” hear its ghost for minutes before the chords finally land, and the release is twice as loud for it. That patience is the flex. Anticipation is part of the payload.
What keeps them from tipping into pure throwback is that they never let the nostalgia get comfortable. Every track has a forward edge: a breakbeat skittering somewhere it shouldn’t, a synth tone a little too modern and cold for the warm feeling it’s serving. They’re not trying to take you back to 1994. They’re using the feeling of 1994, or 2003, or whatever your personal lost golden age is, as a way into something happening right now. The past is the bait. The hook is in the present. Even CHROMA, the dancefloor-first DJ and AV project that became the CHROMA 000 album in November 2025, is them chasing the next room rather than the last one.
Where to start
“Glue” → “Opal” → “Apricots” → “Saku.” That’s the on-ramp.
Most dance music wants you to forget. Bicep want you to remember, and to dance anyway. Two Belfast guys who started out writing about other people’s records are now making the records other people will be homesick for in twenty years. Somewhere a kid is hearing “Glue” for the first time on a night bus, and in 2046 that’s going to hurt.