Interviewing frontman, , in their practice room, just a stone’s throw from where I trained to be a journalist, feels like a full-blown, life-affirming moment. And you know what? It truly is.
As a fresh-faced first-year finding my feet in Nottingham, I proudly proclaimed that I’d discovered music’s next big thing after stumbling across Do Nothing’s newly released track . I quickly learned they were already something of a local institution, with half the band working at indie mecca and local venue The Bodega. Over the next four years, Do Nothing became a fixture in my headphones, from their debut EP ‘Zero Dollar Bill’ and debut album ‘Snake Sideways’ to gigs, and fleeting bar conversations.
The four-piece are now as deeply ingrained in Nottingham lore as , and . Yet they remained one band I never quite managed to pin down for an interview during those early years spent chatting to shitty bands in shitty beer gardens. Now, with plenty of familiar faces and a fair bit of growing up behind me, I’m sitting opposite Chris, to discuss their second studio album, ‘Friend World’, out now via .
Three years on from ‘Snake Sideways’, ‘Friend World’ finds Do Nothing creating a cosmos of striking contradictions, and a masterclass in fresh creative freedom. Its title promises an almost idyllic existence, but the ten tracks that follow offer something considerably more tumultuous.
Bailey assembles a cast of characters whose lives are marked by isolation, betrayal and misery, drawing on anti-comedian Andy Kaufman’s notion of ‘The Willing Outsider’. There are schizophrenic cartoonists, abandoned wives, two confused dogs and individuals seemingly unable to find their place in the world. For all its harrowing subject matter, an unmistakable absurdity runs through the record, carried by Bailey’s stream-of-consciousness narratives and surrealist wit.
Perhaps a little heavy for an opening question five minutes into our conversation on a cold October afternoon. So, let’s start where the album began.
Leaving Snake Sideways behind offered Bailey a creative reset. A self-described freak-out about pressure, its creation, and eventual release left plenty to process, but it also gave him a fresh perspective. “Having finished the first one and had a tough time making it, it just automatically became easy after that,” Chris explains. “It was just that once you finish one thing, then you’re back at the beginning and you can do anything because it’s a new idea.”
One evening, watching YouTube videos alone in his living room, fuelled by Madras and washed down with Holsten Pils, Andy Kaufman and his approach to performance emerged as one of the album’s most defining reference points.
“Sometimes ideas come to you when you’re pretty drunk, and you indulge them because you just get excited about stuff pretty easily,” Bailey admits.
Known for deliberately putting himself at odds with audiences, Kaufman blurred the line between genuine discomfort and performance, leaving people unsettled, questioning whether they witnessed a joke or something entirely sincere. There’s a curious parallel with Bailey’s own relationship with performance. On stage, he channels an unsettling intensity, all anger and anguish with every intonation and gesture. In conversation, he is considerably more reserved. The distance between these two personas is striking.
“That specific thing of someone purposefully being an outsider is the thing I got from Kaufman,” Bailey explains. “That was his whole shtick, putting himself at odds with the audience, and acting like he’s trying really hard, but nothing’s going very well.”
Our conversation unravels into the lengths Kaufman would go to alienate himself from his audience, eventually embracing the role of the villain who actively encouraged people to despise him. Was this performance art? Was this sincere? And how on earth does this relate to ‘Friend World’ and Do Nothing?
Bailey offers up, “I only took stuff from it because I was already looking at this sort of loner idea, and that’s a very lonely place to be, is like getting everyone to hate you.”
Yet Bailey quickly distances himself from the idea that Do Nothing themselves are outsiders: “I don’t feel like, as a band, we’re outsiders really in any way,” he admits.
He does, however, recognise the strange assumptions people make about performers. “Any performer being on stage makes people see you as a different person. People are looking at someone on stage, and it makes you assume they’re outgoing […] but lots of people who perform are actually kind of introverted.”
This begs the question: are the person behind the microphone and the people inhabiting his songs really so different? “I related to the people I was choosing, for sure,” Bailey tells me.
“You end up looking at what you’ve got and thinking, ‘okay, what’s the common thread that ties all this together?’ Once I’d figured that out, it made sense to seek out some people like that.” It wasn’t a case of deliberately searching for lonely outsiders. Rather, those characters began to stand out naturally, and Bailey found himself drawn to the things he recognised in them.
On ‘Smile’, Bailey draws inspiration from an online cartoonist whose struggles with schizophrenia and obsession with an unsolvable puzzle book culminated in a sprawling, deeply troubling comic that ended with his suicide note. ‘Yes’ turns its attention to Helen Palmer, the children’s writer and first wife of Dr Seuss, whose own ambitions were overshadowed by her husband’s success and infidelity. Meanwhile, ‘Stars’ draws on Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a devastating account of unrequited love and an affair with a man whose romantic carelessness left a trail of destruction.
They are unlikely protagonists for a post-punk record, yet something about the way Bailey approaches these solitary and tormented people is particularly empathetic.
“Living in someone else’s shadow is really brutal,” he reflects on ‘Yes’. “She was very supportive to him, nonetheless. It’s when people put their own dreams on hold out of love for someone else and then don’t get rewarded for it at all.”
Despite drawing on the lives of real people, Bailey’s songwriting feels rarely observational. Writing in the first person, he inhabits these characters rather than simply recounting their experiences, allowing their histories and emotions to bleed into his own. He points to Nick Cave as a contrast, whose songs about particular people might unfold in the third person, detailing their lives and actions from a distance. That’s not really his instinct.
It’s a connection that extends beyond the mechanics of songwriting. When I ask whether the loneliness explored across the record reflects something of his own experiences, Bailey is quick to agree.
“Oh, sure, yeah. Picking out certain characters you are interested in obviously just comes from, ‘Why are you interested in it?’ I related to the people I was choosing, for sure.”
For Bailey, that identification opens a wider fascination with human behaviour. It’s less about deciding whether somebody is good or bad, or even whether they deserve sympathy, and more about understanding how they got to where they are.
“I think that’s sort of what anybody does when they watch a film or anything. You subconsciously apply your own values to it and therefore find their character either objectionable or sympathise with them to a certain extent. That’s why film, even about bad people, I sort of see as an exercise in seeing yourself in those people, even though they’re horrible, and thinking about why they ended up the way they did.”
There’s also something particularly striking about the language Bailey uses to populate these worlds. Knives, nails, needles, hammers and guns crop up throughout Friend World and the Do Nothing’s back catalogue. It is very much in Bailey’s vernacular to lend his lyrics a distinctly physical, violent edge. I ask whether there’s a particular fascination with these kinds of images.
“I guess they’re just pretty universal images that make people feel a certain way,” he says. “Some words sound better than others in your mouth. And some words sing better than others.”
Bailey’s vocal performance on Friend World is a real triumph. His vocals have never sounded stronger, showcasing a command and dynamic range, from snarling intensity to a more restrained vulnerability that elevates his already distinctive delivery to another level.
Enough songwriting talk. Let’s move on to laying down the album.
Chris, Kasper, Charlie and Andy kept things local, recording over three and a half weeks at Nottingham’s infamous DIY music and arts cooperative, , once a fruit and vegetable warehouse. With of former tourmates Folly Group behind the desk, alongside studio founder and collaborators and , the album became something of a homegrown community affair.
“It’s nice to work with someone that you, one: are very comfortable with, and two, respect a lot in the way that they work. It’s always nice having friends like that,” Bailey reflects.
After making their debut in a larger London studio, returning to Nottingham brought comfort and ease in compromising on greatness. Chris highlights: It allowed for time spent with friends and family, and supported a space they genuinely enjoy being in. “We sort of wanted to find out if we were able to record at home and put money into a place in our own town that we like […] and we’re extremely happy with the way it sounds.”
One track that remained largely untouched in the studio was the intimate ballad ‘Loner’. Initially captured as a rough demo, the band resisted the temptation to polish away its imperfections. “It’s not a perfect recording by any means, and it’s not performed, but it felt nice to do something like that because we’ve never really done it before. There’s a lot of fiddling and fixing that usually goes on.”
For all the creative freedom that went into making Friend World, the finished record also represents something of a personal victory for Bailey. When asked why he’s so proud of it, he admits: “Probably because, doing the last one, and the way I felt about it and it being released, and there was a perception of it sort of knocked me for six a little bit. So, I was pretty gutted in the way it turned out.”
“I could have very easily gone further down that road and ended up doing another thing I’m not happy with,” he reflects. “I could have easily fallen on my face, and either not made anything else – not made another album.”
Instead, he’s emerged with a record he feels more victorious than anything the band have done before. “I’m just pretty happy that it exists, and I’m pleasantly surprised that I really like it.”
For all its dismal subject matter, there’s a genuine joy in the way Bailey talks about Friend World: the people he made it with, the freedom he found in creating it and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that it exists at all.
For all the lonely characters and unsettling observations that make up Friend World, Bailey isn’t particularly interested in telling anyone what they’re supposed to take away from it.
“I don’t think I really have a message like that,” he says. “The whole fun of the whole thing for me is that other people can use it in whatever way they want.”
‘Friend World’ is now via Submarine Cat Records. Do Nothing have just finished their in-store tour and will soon be heading out on the road with Yard Act, with a UK headline tour planned for February 2027 – tickets here.