W: Meg Glover
The London-based duo Good Health Good Wealth are back with their new single ‘I Forgot’. Released last month, it’s the next track to be added to GHGW’s lineup for their upcoming debut album ‘This Time Next Year We’ll Be Millionaires’. And we got together with lead Bruce to chat about the track, the upcoming album and the musical evolution of GHGW.
GHGW’s lyricist Bruce dives headfirst into his own relationship with drinking on their new track - delving into the other side of just going ‘out for one’. “I mean you get that point every few weeks don't you? When you're like ‘I'm never gonna have a drink again,” he says.
Bruce said: “It's so hard to not get sucked into it. We all go through sort of ups and downs with it where you feel like you've got a hold of it and then it sort of runs away with you.
“I think the good thing is if you do have music you have some sort of outlet and you can get that bad juju out of you by writing, and this song really helped me at that time.”
As the comedown after the Saturday-night track ‘White Men’, the song ‘I Forgot’ leans into the vulnerability of the all-consuming party lifestyle. “So many people go through it. It's my little thing of ‘I get it’ and it's not all fun and games all the time,” he says.
While the song’s lyrics are deeply personal to his own experiences and struggles with alcohol, Bruce comments on the line ‘but I could go out for one’. “We have to keep a bit of light heartedness in there. But that's just what we’re like - trying to cover things up with jokes,” he admits.
With lyrics that a lot of us can relate to, we asked Bruce what he would say to someone going through a similar experience with drinking. “I think my main thing is just try not to be too hard on yourself with this type of thing,” he says.
Bruce said: “In the past, I've really beat myself up about it. You have to make sure you're not an idiot but also everyone's human. Sometimes you make mistakes, sometimes you get overexcited. It's not the end of the world.
“Keep your head on straight, get some fresh air, it'll be okay. But if you need to talk to someone, talk to someone. I've done a bit of that in the past.”
When it came to sitting down and writing the track Bruce explained that sometimes he needs a “specific vibe or specific mood to start things” but other times “it will just fly out”. “I don't know the mindset I was in. Making that beat, it just sort of started coming out. It was a very different song at the start,” he says.
Bruce said: “It was just turning into a different beast as it often does with us. We sort of send things back-and-forth, then we did one session and all of a sudden it was quite cool.
“We actually went on tour and we were in the van listening through things - we ended up almost redoing the whole tune again in the van.”
Calling on influences such as Plan B, ‘AM’-era Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead, ‘I Forgot’ pulls from the various tracks that were on rotation for Bruce at the time. “I was specifically listening to a lot of Plan B,” he says, but likens the guitar riffs to that of the 2013 Arctic Monkeys album ‘AM’. As for why he was listening to Plan B specifically, he said: “You don't listen to Bob Marley when it's raining right? You listen to something when you're in that certain mood, certain frame of mind for it.
“It pulls you into it more, and because we have the narrative of the record as well that really was speaking to me a lot when we were making it.”
While many of GHGW’s songs talk through a variety of real experiences, Bruce told us that he can be a little more understated on some of the tracks, and on ‘I Forgot’ he wanted to let loose. The song represents hitting the Sunday lows, and stands as just one of the chapters in the band’s debut album - which is to be a seven track project documenting each day of the week. The full circle of Bruce’s 20s.
About the tracks on their upcoming album ‘This Time Next Year We’ll Be Millionaires’, Bruce says, “we've been sort of dripping them in over the past year or so because we wanted to give all the songs a fair crack”. He explains that “in this industry it’s hard when you put an album out and you've released maybe two singles. The rest of the album sometimes gets a bit lost and we wanted to really do something a bit different”.
About the tracks that are yet to come he said: “The next one in particular, is a very personal sort of song. It’s me talking to my dad, but it's also a song about my dad - that father-son relationship. So that's a really special song.”
Much like any other band, GHGW have experimented over the years in order to find their musical footing. Touching on the evolution of GHGW, Bruce said that they had to build a sort of faith in themselves “to actually write exactly what we want” as they transitioned from one era to another.
“We had our old band which was a punk band, and some of those early releases they’re great - some of my favourite songs we've got. But ‘Love Hangover’ is a kind of indie pop song,” he says. To counteract this, he says that they’re “not trying to make pop music”, but it has taken the duo a while to overcome their imposter syndrome, and dodge falling into the trap of following trends.
He says they avoid the “this one sounds like it could be a dance on TikTok” mindset and instead lean into music that “is actually about real life”. About their 2024 track ‘Full Circle’, while it did well on social media, Bruce said that it wasn’t their intention, and that “it's a really personal song that we wrote and put out because we loved it”.
After playing both Leeds and Reading Festival this August, we asked Bruce what it’s like for the duo playing in front of a crowd of around 40,000 compared to those smaller intimate sets. “The thing is it's exactly the same. You just have to do the exact same show whether you're applying in front of 50 people or 5000 people,” Bruce says.
He said: “We have the same little routine, our handshake, we give each other a kiss before we get on - and we do it the same. The only difference really is the stage is massive, and I can move about more.
“Leeds Fest in particular, I had a wireless mic - and that's the first time I've ever had one of them, that was very fun. I was running around like a kid to be honest. I was literally sprinting around the stage.”
After selling out nearly all of their dates for their November headline tour, Bruce leaves us with one lasting note about their new single. “I'm really looking forward to playing it out live, and hopefully getting people to shout ‘I have to stop drinking’,” he says.
