INTRODUCING: 2ND MAGPIE

South London collective 2nd Magpie Project return with “On The Beach” — a striking left turn from the apocalyptic edge of their previous single “Get A Gun (And Learn To Shoot)”. Swapping urgency for introspection, the new track leans into melodic pop-rock, capturing the quiet emotional limbo of a relationship reaching its end. Built around their philosophy of finding light in darker moments, the band continue to carve out a space for thoughtful, emotionally-driven songwriting — balancing despair with just enough hope to keep moving forward.

1.“On The Beach” marks quite a shift from your previous single Get A Gun (And Learn To Shoot)—what sparked this move from darker, apocalyptic energy into something more reflective and melodic?

You can’t be angry all the time; it gets exhausting! I wish we could pretend there’s a masterplan, but there’s not – we just write the songs that come to mind. Some work better than others and we persevere with them. Get A Gun was driven by a despair at the way the world’s going wrong and a sense of powerlessness to do anything more than try to protect yourself. On The Beach is more intimate and personal. I guess there’s a despair in it, but also a shred of hope that maybe it’s not over.

2. Your name reflects a philosophy of finding positivity—how does that mindset shape the way you write about something as complicated as the end of a relationship?

A guy who worked for me once said he admired the way that however bad things got I always looked for the second magpie! We’re not a glee club – you can’t pretend everything’s great when it isn’t. But I do always try to find the positive. The song captures that moment of exhaustion when you know it’s over and, as the lyric says, you’re “too tired to argue who’s wrong and who’s right.” But even in the face of defeat, the guy in the song manages to enjoy the simple pleasure of skimming stones and looks forward to a time when he might be able to look back and accept “everything’s done for a reason.”

3. The lyric in “On The Beach” captures that moment between letting go and holding on—was this drawn from a personal experience, or more of a character-driven narrative?

I never sat on the beach like the guy in the song, skimming stones as his lover leaves. But we’ve all had those times where we know it’s over. We feel bad about it and know we need to move on, but there’s still a part of us that wants to hope that maybe it can still work out. I love songs with that emotional ambiguity. In the chorus, the guy’s poised between thinking “there’s too much we need to forget”, but also hoping that in time he’ll feel “there’s nothing we need to regret.”.

4.2nd Magpie Project is described as a “loose collective” with fluid membership—how does that dynamic influence your sound and the way your songs come together?

The biggest influence on how things come together is our lack of experience and musical ability! So everything’s an experiment. We usually start with a set of lyrics and a rough chord sequence and build up from there. What normally happens is the song gets overloaded with ideas and the hardest work is pruning everything back again and taking bits out. It’s similar to writing – one of the hardest things about writing fiction is being ruthless about what you strip out at the rewrite stage. You have to do that with songs too. And because we’re teaching ourselves all the technical side of recording (and we’re frankly a bit rubbish at it!) it takes us ages.

5.You started making music as a response to being challenged to “do better”—now that you’ve released multiple singles, how has that original motivation evolved?

We’re pleased with how a couple of songs have turned out. We wouldn’t put them out if we didn’t think they were good enough. But the more you learn the more you realise you don’t know, and we’re self-taught as recording engineers and we know we can get better. If we were to blow our own trumpet, I think we’d say we’re confident that we’ve got songs worth listening to. For me, a song always has to say something, and have words worth hearing. I think ours do. But we want to get better at the way we present them. And we will.