SIXTEENQ | INTERVIEW + EP REVIEW
Some musical partnerships make perfect sense on paper. Others bring together two completely different worlds and somehow find something extraordinary in the middle. SixteenQ belongs firmly in the latter category. Formed by Katie and Simon, the duo combines decades of experience across punk, rock, jazz, cabaret and theatre, resulting in a sound that moves confidently between intricate guitar arrangements, soaring vocals and beautifully layered harmonies. Their debut EP, Accidental Apocalypse, introduces a band with little interest in following conventional genre boundaries, instead allowing their contrasting musical backgrounds to shape something distinctly their own. Remarkably, the partnership began through a chance encounter on an online musicians' forum, where a short clip of Simon's playing immediately caught Katie's attention. Within two months, they had written enough material for an album. It's an unlikely beginning, but perhaps that's part of the appeal. There's an unmistakable chemistry between the two, built on different musical instincts, shared humour and a willingness to see where the songs take them.
Then there's the small matter of the apocalypse. Beyond the music, SixteenQ have developed an elaborate fictional universe populated by semi-skeletonised survivors, unusual characters and an irradiated octopus-dachshund hybrid named Kevin. What initially sounds like an entertainingly bizarre concept gradually reveals a more thoughtful examination of human behaviour, vulnerability and the things we hold onto when everything else disappears. Katie's illustrations bring this strange world into focus, while the songs explore its emotional territory without demanding that listeners interpret everything literally. Beneath the eccentric imagery are reflections on grief, shame, resilience and the complicated nature of being human. Interestingly, despite the potential for enormous arrangements and dramatic production, SixteenQ insist on building their songs acoustically first. Their philosophy is straightforward: if the melody, lyrics and structure can't hold an audience without embellishment, the song isn't finished. It's an approach that gives the material a strong foundation, regardless of how adventurous the final arrangements become.
Across its four tracks, Accidental Apocalypse moves through contrasting moods and musical styles, from the infectious optimism of Accidentally Excellent to the emotional intensity of Deal With The Devil. Yet despite those differences, there's a consistent personality running through the record, one that balances theatricality with genuine emotional substance. Perhaps the most interesting thing about SixteenQ is the contrast between the world they've imagined and the outlook that seems to drive them. Their fictional landscape may be falling apart, but the stories within it are often concerned with what survives: compassion, individuality, humour and the stubborn human instinct to keep going. It's an unexpectedly hopeful perspective for a project built around the end of civilisation, and one that gives their debut an identity beyond its unusual premise. We caught up with Katie and Simon to discuss the beginnings of SixteenQ, the stories behind Accidental Apocalypse, their wonderfully strange cast of characters and why, even when the world falls apart, there's always a reason to keep the music playing. This is a paid collaboration with SixteenQ.
EP REVIEW - Accidental Apocolypse
SixteenQ waste absolutely no time making an impression with Accidental Apocalypse, launching straight into soaring, distorted guitars and an enormous wall of sound that immediately demands your attention. Yet what makes the opening track, Accidentally Excellent, so enjoyable is the balance between its intensity and the beautiful melodic restraint of the vocals. There's a fascinating contrast at work here. The instrumentation feels powerful, punchy and almost overwhelming at times, while the vocal melodies bring everything back down to earth, giving the song a surprising sense of calm. The guitar leads are particularly impressive, weaving through the arrangement with confidence, while carefully placed harmonies add another layer of warmth. I love the way the production uses breaks and changes in dynamics to keep the listener engaged, allowing the music to breathe before building back into those enormous sections. It's an excellent introduction to the EP, establishing a sound that's heavy and adventurous without sacrificing the melodic qualities that make a song genuinely memorable.
Then comes Deal With The Devil, and SixteenQ turn up the intensity with some seriously satisfying riffage. There's an infectious energy to this track that makes it easy to imagine a crowd completely losing themselves to it live. The guitars are thick and driving, but there's still a strong melodic foundation holding everything together. What really catches my attention is the syncopated vocal delivery, which adds an almost percussive quality to the storytelling before the arrangement drops into a beautifully executed breakdown. Lyrically, there's something particularly striking about the imagery of drums, ancient warnings and voices calling through the darkness. The repeated pleas to call off the dogs feel almost ritualistic, while references to daughters, sons and those left vulnerable give the song a much deeper emotional weight. It's a powerful piece of writing that suggests fear, persecution and the unsettling ways people can become complicit in something destructive. I especially appreciate how much lyrical ground the song covers without relying on constant repetition. The words keep developing, the tension continues to build, and the instrumentation responds with an urgency that makes the entire performance feel wonderfully theatrical.
Something offers another shift in atmosphere, bringing an almost euphoric, heroic quality to the EP. There's a nostalgic warmth to its melodies, the kind that feels strangely familiar even on a first listen, before another beautifully constructed guitar riff comes crashing through. What impresses me is that SixteenQ never seem to confuse heaviness with aggression. Even when the guitars are at their most commanding, there's an underlying tenderness to the arrangements, with melodies that remain calming, expressive and genuinely beautiful. By the time Chefs Kiss arrives to close the record, the duo have found yet another way to keep things interesting. This might actually be my favourite track of the four. The instrumental fills are fantastic, the transitions feel wonderfully natural, and there's a real sense of chemistry in the way every element works together. Nothing feels forced or unnecessarily complicated, despite how much is happening musically. You can hear the strength of the songwriting beneath the production, with the instruments complementing one another rather than competing for attention.
What makes Accidental Apocalypse such an enjoyable EP is the sheer range of musical ideas SixteenQ manage to explore while maintaining a recognisable identity. Across four tracks, they move between soaring rock arrangements, intricate guitar work, infectious grooves, delicate harmonies and moments of genuine emotional vulnerability. The contrast between the music's often uplifting melodic character and the darker themes beneath its surface is particularly compelling. There's humour, imagination and theatricality here, but also a serious consideration of human behaviour and the things we choose to protect when the world around us begins to unravel. Knowing that Katie and Simon approach their songwriting acoustically first makes the strength of these arrangements even more impressive. Beneath all that distortion and musical experimentation are songs with genuinely solid foundations. Accidental Apocalypse is an ambitious, beautifully melodic and thoroughly entertaining debut that rewards your attention from beginning to end. Four distinct tracks, each bringing something new to the table, and not a dull moment among them. SixteenQ have created something wonderfully unusual, and I'm already curious to hear where they take it next.
SixteenQ came together when you were both experienced enough to know exactly what you were doing, yet apparently ready to step outside everything you'd become comfortable with. There's something interesting about taking creative risks later in your artistic lives, when you've already spent decades developing your individual identities. Did meeting each other give you permission to explore something you'd been quietly wanting to do for years, or did this project reveal creative ambitions neither of you knew you had?
KATIE: I’ve always been a writer and hoarder of music. I would write, sometimes record and then….nope. Something was holding me back and I do feel that a large part of that was an innate need for privacy and reluctance to share my most vulnerable self. Which probably sounds a bit daft given the amount of time I spend onstage being ridiculous but there is such a risk in putting yourself out there no holds barred. I was literally just scrolling through an online forum for musicians and happened to have the sound on (something that I rarely do) and the clip Simon shared just flicked a switch in my head to “Yes! I want that sound in my life!”
SIMON: UMMMMMMMM That's a good question. I think it is more the fact that there wasn’t anything dictating the way we were writing whether that be niche audiences or specific tastes we just wrote what came to us which happened very quickly with enough for an album in two months. But also we both have drastically different background in music and it was fun to collaborate with those differences. Also there was no pressure. Previously in other bands I had pressure to write a lot and for specific genres.
Simon, your background in punk and rock suggests a relationship with music built around energy, urgency and physical expression, while Katie's experience spans jazz, cabaret, theatre and multidisciplinary performance. Those worlds approach storytelling and musical tension in very different ways. When you first began writing together, what was the biggest assumption about music that the other person challenged? And has collaborating with someone from such a different creative background changed what you consider a good song?
Simon: I think my biggest creative difference from other musicians is that I have always wanted to write songs which are melodically strong and use certain patterns that I think are necessary to tell a story. I play a strange guitar tuning which can emulate two guitars playing at the same time which helped us to find our song structures. Also layering a lot of guitarists that I’m personally influenced by in there really shaped our sound.
Your debut EP is called Accidental Apocalypse, which is a fascinating title because an apocalypse is usually imagined as something enormous and inevitable, while an accident suggests something almost embarrassingly ordinary. There's a darkly comic possibility that the end of the world might arrive not through some grand act of evil, but through a series of small decisions nobody thought mattered. What does the word 'accidental' mean within the world you've created, and are you more interested in the catastrophe itself or the human behaviour that makes catastrophe possible?
KATIE: I think we are at the point in history where we have enough hindsight to realise that patterns of human behaviour are incredibly repetitive and that the most damaging events rarely announce themselves with a forty five piece brass band fanfare. Evil, true, destructive evil, the desire to use and crush and exploit is insidious. It starts with a whisper, not a shout. Observation of human behaviour was ingrained for me from early childhood. My parents often spoke about what might motivate a behaviour, what we could learn, how we might make the world a kinder place one person at a time. This was in the 1980s, before much of that was spoken of in the home, so yeah I guess there is a lifetime of personal fascination behind that.
SIMON: When I imagined the accidental apocalypse I think that it took the shape of people thinking our music would be one kind of sound and then listening to it, and being “oh that’s not what I thought it would be.” An example I can think of is a band I was recently listening to named “Bilmuri” who don’t specidfically have a genre. They are country mixed jazz and metal and saxophones, and it was like a mash of music like an apocolypse. And also Katie and myself are a little bit weird. (Katie: You’re weird!) And we wanted to make our band have a theme and the theme could have been waterparks or the apocalypse. We decided on the apocalypse. Plus I have sausage dogs which somehow morphed into our mascot, the irradiated octopus/dacschund hybrid named Kevin.
You've created an entire parallel post-apocalyptic world around SixteenQ, complete with illustrations, strange creatures and the possibility of ongoing adventures. I'm curious about the relationship between the music and that imagined environment. Do the songs create the world, or does the world begin to dictate what the songs need to become? And have you ever found yourselves making a musical decision because it felt truthful to the fictional universe, even if it wasn't necessarily the most conventional songwriting choice?
KATIE: This feels like a chicken/egg moment, no? I believe the music kicked the whole thing off. The music and the random conversations we would have while we were creating very quickly sparked an idea of a creature that would be a part of our lore and of course this creature would exist in a space and time somehow. And while the songs tie in with the universe if you know what you are looking for (or even want to look, because we’re not going to tell people how to enjoy their music) we’re not going to force a decision that doesn’t feel organic. Our collective songwriting works primarily because we trust the process and let it play out, without spelling out the story literally.
SIMON: Not at all…the artwork is just part of our expression of us in a different form in a world we made up. And versions of us in the world that we created. A lot of it reflects in jokes or things that we have just found entertaining.The art is just another aspect of our art.
Katie, as both a vocalist and visual artist, you have two very different ways of bringing an imaginary world into existence. An illustration can show us exactly what a creature or landscape looks like, while a vocal performance can suggest something far more ambiguous and emotionally unsettling. When you're developing SixteenQ's mythology, are there things you deliberately leave unexplained in the artwork because you want the music to communicate them instead? And do you think mystery becomes more powerful when an audience is allowed to complete part of the story themselves?
KATIE: The unspoken and unseen are extremely powerful tools in narrative creation. As I said previously, none of this is strictly literal. So people can take (or not) what they want and need from both the music and the illustrations and that doesn’t have to be what we imagined, we’d just like people to walk away feeling like they’ve experienced something new, and had feeling about it. As a person with neurological irregularities which result in very little differentiation between the senses, it doesn’t make much difference to me where a feeling/thought/story is expressed but rather that it is expressed somewhere. I do like to let people fill in the blanks themselves if they can.
Simon, your writing has been described as percussive, polyphonic and multilayered, while Katie brings soaring melodies and close harmonies into that musical environment. There's an interesting tension between complexity and emotional immediacy, because a listener might not consciously recognise the different musical layers but can still feel their effect. When you're constructing a SixteenQ song, how do you know whether an arrangement is deepening the emotional narrative or simply becoming more complicated? And have either of you ever had to sacrifice a musical idea you loved because the story needed something simpler?
Simon: I’ve scrapped hundreds of songs over the years that were not working. I think that there is a fine line between giving the person what they think they need to hear and making it too complex. The layers are what I can hear and what makes sense to me instinctively. If you have to overthink the song and you have ten million parts, you probably need a simpler song. We scrapped plenty of songs here as well, where we thought it was a good idea but then they just didn’t vibe.
The post-apocalyptic genre has traditionally been fascinated by what happens when civilisation collapses, but some of its most compelling stories are really about what survives: compassion, humour, memory, loyalty and the strange human instinct to keep creating meaning. When you imagine the creatures and characters inhabiting SixteenQ's world, are they primarily reflections of the society that existed before the catastrophe, or attempts to imagine what humanity might become afterwards? And is there something about the world we currently live in that becomes easier to examine when you disguise it as fiction?
KATIE: I’ve always felt that in a post-apocalypse world that both the best and the worst of us would survive. The human inhabitants in our little alternate reality are both alive and not, semi-skeletonised but still sentient and emotionally capable. I’m super awkward turtles when it comes to speaking on feelings, particularly around loss, grief and shame so examining this through the safety filter of song and illustration has definitely been a revealing experience.
You made your live debut acoustically in June before heading into the studio in August to record Accidental Apocalypse. That's an interesting order for a project whose identity seems so connected to layered arrangements, atmosphere and world-building. Did performing the songs in a stripped-back setting expose something about their emotional foundations that might otherwise have been hidden beneath the production? And when you entered the studio, were you trying to preserve the intimacy of those first performances or deliberately transform the songs into something much larger?
KATIE: Call us old school, but if a song isn’t melodically, lyrically, and structurally sound enough to perform acoustically, we need to write a better song. Like anything else, the foundation is so important. The songs were written acoustically because we were not going to give ourselves anywhere to hide. The advantage of experience is knowing what you have to do to sound good, the disadvantage is it’s easy to become reliant on what I would call for myself “Showgirl sparkle with extra jazz hands” and Simon would probably have a way cooler name for. Writing acoustically and then putting it in the public eye gave us the opportunity to test the strength of our songs. We were always going to be both plugged in and acoustic depending on the situation, however the lines, the sound, everything, we could both always hear it no matter how it was presented.
Simon: Our song writing process has always been acoustic. If we can’t translate that to electric…for example we have a new one in the works called “If This Is It” it’s heavier with lots of intricate guitar parts that were written as all acoustic and translated into electric. One song plays acoustic, one song plays electric, that’s how we found our differences.
With four tracks on Accidental Apocalypse, you've chosen to introduce listeners to a fictional universe through a relatively small musical window. In storytelling, what you leave out can be just as important as what you reveal, particularly when you're inviting people into a world they don't yet understand. Did you approach the EP as four individual songs that happen to share an atmosphere, or as four different perspectives on a larger narrative? And if someone listened to the tracks in reverse order, would they discover a different story, or is there an emotional progression that only makes sense when experienced as intended?
KATIE: Each song was chosen on merit but we were always going to open with Accidentally Excellent. It’s just a joyous romp about living in the moment, really hopeful vibes. So backwards or forwards listening to the EP you’ll always get that injection of ‘Trust it’s going to be alright.’ There is a Millenia of suppressed rage in Deal With The Devil. Whether you hear it second or third that is going to an emotional gut punch.
SIMON: I think it was more that we wanted to showcase four songs which showcased our individuality as musicians from a softer song to a more rocky song to a wall of sound, and a heavy genre. But what we maintained was it all sounded like us. It was our sound.
There's something strangely hopeful about two artists with decades of experience coming together to create music about the end of the world. SixteenQ seems to suggest that even after everything familiar has disappeared, there's still room for imagination, connection and the possibility of building something entirely new. Imagine the fictional world of Accidental Apocalypse becomes a reality tomorrow, and everything you've spent your lives building as musicians and artists suddenly disappears. You can preserve just one thing from your creative lives to help the next generation understand why humanity made art in the first place. What would you choose, and what would you hope they understood about us?
KATIE: In our fictional world, two of the human (or what now passes for human) survivors are The Bard, and The Songstress. When they eventually cross paths and form an unconventional little family until with Kevin the Octoshund their mission transcends survival. Instinctively they know that the world needs hope, and that the music must play on. So they make it their mission to take the music to whomever might need to hear it. To answer the question, I would choose a song that made me laugh, cry, and persevere with the sometimes heavy business of living. Which song? Maybe we haven’t written it yet, or maybe we have. If I had to choose from our current catalogue it would probably be "Accidently Excellent" because it is primarily about staying in the moment, allowing yourself contentment. Maybe I would use it to say "This is what hope sounds like, this is how we carry on."
Simon: Mine would probably be more of a quote. When I was a young guitarist and learning my original guitar teacher said to me “Always be an individual amoungst the many.” The meaning behind that was to always stay truthful to your art, you don’t have to listen to all the opinions and critiques, just do you. And if you mess up and if you can’t play, at least you tried. Just be you.
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