This week we proudly unveiled a collaboration with London punk-duo Nova Twins and Dr Martens for ‘Voices For The Unheard’, a compilation LP aiming to spotlight underrepresented alternative P.O.C artists, available here. Nova Twins have been a massive force for good in the fight for racial equality, using their platform to educate and inspire and I wanted to use this post to give a little more information about the importance of this record. 

This collaboration, lovingly funded by Dr Martens, means that 100% of the proceeds from the record will go to the charity ‘The Black Curriculum’. Founded in 2019 it’s a project that delivers black history lessons in schools across the UK and provides young people with free and licensable resources about black history. My personal experience of history at school (albeit a while ago now) was that education happened around particular specifically chosen events in history whilst completely ignoring huge chunks of history that, to be honest, would not frame our history in such a positive light but would begin to explain many of the systemic issues that exist.

It’s massively important that we’re now having a more real conversation about systemic racism and the history of these issues and this charity’s doing a fantastic job of bringing this to the forefront. We’re also hoping that this record inspires other P.O.C artists to get involved in the genre.

“There’s a lack of representation and understanding of POC alternative artists, particularly in the UK,” Amy from the band says, “People are happy for black people to be in R&B and hip-hop because they feel like it’s safe and that’s the done thing. These are genres that black people have pioneered, but there’s a lack of education about how rock was also pioneered and helped to move forward by artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The genre was carried by a lot of white men, but a lot of the POC artists got lost along the way.”

“There’s so much that we don’t know,” Georgia adds, “There are so many things that we were fed in school that were just pointless and not relevant to us as a culture. It’s the same all across the world… It’s important for us to inspire the new generation coming through, because the scene is very sparse in the UK. If this inspires a lot of people to be creative, then that’s great.”