I first heard Biig Piig on BBC Radio 6 one afternoon in the car when there was nothing of interest on Radio 4 Extra. It is a go to option in these circumstances and usually I heard something that I find bears further scrutiny – Biig Piig certainly came into that category. This is the track that was played.
Jessica Smyth, known by the stage name Biig Piig, is an Irish singer and rapper, based in West London. She performs in English and Spanish. Smyth was born in Cork, Ireland, she grew up in Spain, where her family had moved on advice that the climate would be better for her brother’s asthma. Upon moving with her family back to Ireland, she was at first able to read and write only in Spanish, and had to reintegrate into Irish culture. After living in Waterford and then Kerry, when she was 14 the family moved to West London, where Smyth worked as a late-night poker dealer and where her parents continue to run a pub.
She began writing songs in during her first six months in London prior to starting school there, influenced by acoustic balladeers like Lewis Watson and Ben Howard. At first she wrote in a folk style, on guitar and ukulele. Then in a Music Tech class at Richmond College she met Lava La Rue, founder and Creative Director] of NiNE8, a collective of like-minded young DIY musical artists. During this period Smyth performed at Soho open mics, joined NiNE8, and found a new voice at a freestyling session in 2015 where she also met Mac Wetha, with whom she began writing and who became a major producer for her.
In 2016 Smyth began uploading her music to Soundcloud. In 2017 her single ‘Vice City’ caught the attention of digital music platform COLORS, who invited her to record a live video session of the song at their Berlin studios. Released in April, it was a breakthrough for her, and has been viewed over six million times on YouTube and streamed more than three million times on Spotify. She followed it up with the singles ’24K’ and ‘Perdida’. The latter gained her further notice and has netted more than five million Spotify streams.
In April 2018 she released the first of a trilogy of projects, the five-track EP Big Fan of the Sesh, Vol 1. Its sequel, A World Without Snooze, Vol 2, followed in March 2019. She released the track ‘Roses and Gold’ in October 2019 in advance of a headlining European tour and her first official label release ‘Sunny’.
The third in her trilogy, No Place For Patience, Vol. 3, her first EP on RCA, was released in November 2019. Smyth found the pseudonym ‘Biig Piig’ on a pizza menu.] She has explained that the name ‘puts no pressure on me to be a certain way – I can be a mess, and I can also be cute and put together.
