Big Fear

Big Fear—like Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Dick—is a vaguely menacing and all-encompassing boogeyman; a reckoning with fear itself. Formed by Alice Edwards (lead vocals), Jack Wilkinson (guitar) and Ben Crone (synth), the London trio explores the point where terror curdles into apathy. Self-reflexively dystopian and operatic, Big Fears’ songs are synth-throbbing generational anthems served with an almost ironic pomp.

Edwards draws such a powerful reaction, in part, because they give a megaphone to those who have scarcely been represented before. Asexual and nonbinary, Edwards says they’ve experienced “a distinct separation from a media and music and culture” that has privileged romantic and gender essentialist narratives. A shrewd storyteller and wild performer with a sharp viewpoint, Edwards is forging a place of belonging for outsiders. Here, in Big Fear’s world, sex isn’t the be all and end all, but a kind of joke, one that Edwards sings about with a cloying wink and a dispassionate remove. It’s why only they could possibly come up with that crab line. It’s why only they could take on the force that is Big Fear.