nightlife

Q1. For our readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you please provide some background on the band: where you’re from, when and how you formed, etc.

for sure! we’re from baltimore, relatively new as this band (2 years) but we’ve been playing together in different contexts for much longer. hansel wanted to make a band that could hang with the other “heavy pop” bands growing in the scene, then him & julian linked up to work on the songs that’d become the first EP. the mission & vision are always shifting, but we’re still here to bring groove & the funk to the genres of alt & heavy music we love so much.

Q2. Who are some of your primary influences?

it’s hard to narrow down, each member has different sides they bring to the table at different times. for hansel, it’s a lot of r&b and music with experimental production mixed with the heaviest shit you’ve ever heard. julian brings a more eclectic background in reggae, funk, soul, and so much more with him, in addition to also digging tech-djent and other progressive stuff. isaiah’s a drumhead through & through, and fucks with a lot of instrumental/experimental hiphop and jazz fusion stuff with killer rhythms on top of deathcore & the more progressive sides of metal.

all of us can kinda come back from whatever tangents we’ve gone on musically and center around heavy, groovy guitar stuff as a group pretty naturally.

Q3. What made you want to pursue making music?

it’s different for all of us, but we’re all connected by a desire to see more shit like what happens in our minds out there in the music we love. that’ll always start with us making stuff to begin with, but hopefully it’ll end with a bunch of different bands & artists pushing the boundaries of guitar music to its groovy ends.

Q4. How did your addition to some dates for the Issues farewell tour come about and what’s the experience been like? Tell us about the world’s first RnB mosh pit!

honestly it was kinda a few years coming! back in 2020 hansel posted a video of him singing an issues song that got some traction on twitter, including from issues themselves. we’ve communicated back & forth over the years since for this or that, be it to write together or to talk about their music with others or whatever. they’ve always been super supportive of what we’re doing and we’ve always tried to be as open as we could about their influence, legacy, & importance. eventually they hit us to see if we were around and while it still blew our minds, it also made sense & we were so grateful they saw that.

playing the shows was kinda crazy. it was our first experience with a lot of things, including even basic logistics of getting to & from the shows, let alone being backstage & navigating the show days themselves. it all kinda flew by once it was time for the shows, but it was completely surreal the whole time. WAY more people knew about us & our music than we expected, and the crowds were so supportive both times. honestly, it goes to show the kind of community issues was building with their music for the past decade plus that they were able to pull this whole thing off so gracefully, our part included.

the rnb pits were absolutely crazy to watch. we’re sure they weren’t actually the “first” of their kind, but looking in even just for a second you could tell the vibes were a little different than your normal moshpit. everyone was still bumping & throwing limbs, but there was clearly an emphasis on everyone having a good time – the same vibe that was in the crowd the whole night, tbh.

Q5. Tell us about your most recent single “face2face.”

it’s been a long time coming! we spent a lot of 2023 talking with industry folks and seeing what we could make come of it. that meant trying a bunch of different things and languishing over demos for way too long…kinda like we’re doing now, except we weren’t sure what we wanted to make as a next move. the industry stuff fizzled out, & we ended up staring ourselves in the face again & wondering what the goal here was.

“face2face” kinda came to be finished first out of these new songs, and it definitely captures a lot of the ideas we’ve been trying to work through – the exploit of repackaged nostalgia, updating old ideas & continuing things others started, that kinda thing. we want to do more than just say “hey remember when” when we throw it back, and already face2face itself has started showing the connections between what we do now, what r&b groups like TLC or Boyz II Men used to do, and what other artists around the music world are doing – k-pop already had its y2k era, for example. we love music so much & it’s fun to make these connections in realtime & learn more about it as we go.

Q6. If you were to highlight one song as “quintessential Nightlife,” what would it be and why?

probably new low! we had our whole lives to write that song, you know? there’s so much context & energy that went into making that one song that it only gets better with time to us. it shows more of us to us every year & feels like it’ll be one of those songs that might just last forever, be that in our scene or whatever.

Q7. Dream lineup: what artists would you most want to share the stage with that you have not had the opportunity to?

oh man. in the heavy world, we’ve fucked with & respected bring me the horizon for years individually so that would be a dream. other bands that are killing it with their own unique sounds also inspire us so that’d be sick – bands like bad omens, sleep token, static dress, the home team, they’d all be sick to play with.

getting more creative, groovy mfs like anderson .paak or thundercat are def at the top of the list. artists who push the envelope like charli xcx or rina sawayama would be so cool too, & k-pop groups like stray kids or (g)i-dle would go crazy.

dreaming completely, give it d’angelo, miss lauryn hill, or the roots too.

Q8. What’s on the horizon for Nightlife?

more music! if a single bigger body of work shows itself to us while we’re making these songs we’ll work toward it for sure, but for now we just want to keep experimenting & seeing how many sounds we can fuck with that we wanna. so singles on singles on singles, if we can keep our shit on!

we’re also going on our first full US tour in june, so that’ll be a gamechanger for the band for sure. hopefully it’ll mark the start of a bunch of playing out for us.