The history of Scottish rock 'n' pop isn’t short of great duos, from The Proclaimers and The Associates to Strawberry Switchblade, Boards Of Canada and 1960s pop act The McKinlay Sisters – recently re-discovered thanks to Carla J Easton and Blair Young’s documentary about the history of Scottish girl bands, Since Yesterday. And so, with sounds ranging from retro indie jangle to ultra-cool electro pop and techno-punk with a political edge, here are five more duos to watch.
The Cords
Fans ofEdinburgh’s great, lost 1980s band The Shop Assistants throw up your hands and say: ‘Hallelujah! They’re back – sort of, anyway’. Why? Because the spirit of the original C86 scene of which The Shop Assistants were a part has been re-born in a couple of sisters fromGreenock – Eva and Grace Tedeschi, who together make music as The Cords, with Grace on drums and Eva on guitar and vocals. Named for a compilation cassette given away free with the NME in 1986, the C86 scene also featured a host of other Scottish bands including Primal Scream, The Pastels and The Soup Dragons. The Cords channel the lo-fi indie guitar jangle of all those groups but have cheekily re-christened their sound C25. Whatever. They’re fast winning friends and audiences, and after a releasing a cassette and flexi-disc – how retro is that? – they dropped their first album proper in September, titled simply The Cords. They have already bagged a BBC Radio 6Music session and you can catch them atEdinburgh’s Wee Red Bar, part of EdinburghArt College, on December 20. It could well be one of those ‘I was there’ gigs.
Comfort
Another sibling duo, Glasgow-based Comfort comprise Natalie and Sean McGhee and together they have a sound which blends Sean’s drumming and Natalie’s confrontational, hip-hop-inspired spoken-word lyrics – often relating her experiences as a trans woman – with a battery of off-kilter samples. Stalwarts of Glasgow’s DIY and Queer club and live music scenes, they released a debut album, Not Passing, in 2019. A second album, What’s Bad Enough?, followed in 2023 and found its way onto the Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) longlist. It was described by one critic as “a bravura piece of lawless defiance.” New single, Forever, has just been released, and you can catch Comfort playing at St Luke’s in Glasgow on November 29 before they head to Switzerland for a festival date in Geneva.
Maranta
Synthpop suits the duo format – as well as The Associates think Soft Cell, Erasure etc. – and Edinburgh-based pair Gloria Black and Callum Govan are no exception to the rule. Though it’s perfectly adapted to the dance-floor, you would describe the music they make as make cool, moody and atmospheric rather than four-to-the-floor bangers. They formed in 2018 and in 2022 dropped excellent EP Deux Pleasure on Lost Map Records, the label run by Johnny Lynch (aka The Pictish Trail) from his home on Eigg. Their debut album Day Long Dream followed in May of this year and was released on Paradise Palm Records, run out of the Edinburgh venue/bar/record shop of that name. It won a place on the SAY award shortlist, with the judges describing it as having an abundance of “electronic dreamscapes, pulsing dance floor mutations and improvisational meanderings” which “transitions through alternate realities and slips between illusory worlds.” And all done from a studio in Leith.
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Cloth
Another 2025 SAY award-shortlisted album was Pink Silence, the work of yet another pair of siblings, Glasgow-based Rachael and Paul Swinton. Theirs is a more standard, guitars and drums approach to songwriting, though again there’s a moodiness to the music thanks to a less-is-more studio approach and to Rachael’s intimate, close-miked vocals. Pink Silence was released on Rock Action Records, the label founded and run by Glasgow post-rock titans Mogwai (there are few better indicators of quality on the Scottish music scene) and it followed two previous albums, Cloth and Secret Measure. Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite collaborated on the new album, as did Portishead mainstay Adrian Utley and award-winning (and Oscar-nominated) Canadian multi-instrumentalist Owen Pallett, sometime member of Arcade Fire. Nice friends to have.
Free Love
Though fond of singing in French, Free Love are actually Glasgow-based couple Suzi and Lewis Cook. As Happy Meals, the pair’s recording history goes back a decade but their EP debut as Free Love came in 2018 and they released Inside, their first album proper under that name, in 2023. It brought them another SAY Award nomination (they already had three) and the act and their music was described by the judges as “a conscious study in duality: thumping live tracks and meditational mantras, pop songs and esoteric experiments, acoustic and electronic instrumentation, lyrics in French and English, the Masculine and the Feminine, all side-by-side.” Spacey and pleasingly odd might be a more succinct description. Meanwhile they describe themselves as “Artists of sonic light, transmuters of pure celestial NRG, educators, inspirators and radiators – of this world and the next”. The educators bit is certainly right. As well as making music together the Cooks run the non-profit Glasgow Library of Synthesized Sound (GLOSS), the UK’s first library of electronic instruments. There they run workshops among other things, so if you don’t know your pitch from your filter cut-off but want to learn, GLOSS is the place to be.
