Night Tapes

2025 - Most bands would say their music is a product of their environment, but it’s true for none more than Night Tapes. On the London trio’s extraordinary, dazzling debut album, portals//polarities, the band take you inside the places and sounds of its creation around the globe. Across the album, you’ll hear a bubbling swamp in Tallinn, Estonia, wildlife and birdsong from Mexico, a Los Angeles police helicopter and more. It’s a deeply immersive and wildly exploratory first full statement from a unique and thrilling act. Environment and surroundings has always been vital to the music of the trio. Initially it was by necessity, before it became their secret weapon. Making music together in a shared house in southeast London, the songs of Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan and Sam “Richie” Richards had to be quiet to avoid disturbing neighbours. “It was about capturing the vibe of the house,” Vesik remembers, then realising that the songs “became time capsules of the different places we were.” For Richards, each song comes with a specific and clear memory of the surroundings in which it was created. “It feels like a flipbook of that time,” he says. The music, featuring ‘band’ sounds of guitars, bass and drums but made on laptops and built up in a way similar to dance music, is dreamy and widescreen but with plenty of bite. Debut single ‘Forever’ now sits on 10 million streams on Spotify and became an underground hit through the pandemic. Traditional song structures can often handbrake turn into dissonant noise or extended ambient sections, blurring the lines between band and studio project in new and exciting ways. While their first songs, collected on the EPs Dream Forever In Glorious Stereo (2019), Download Spirit (2020) and Perfect Kindness (2023) were utilising the sounds and vibes of shared houses and the ambient buzz of London, the success of those tracks brought with it world tours, on which portals//polarities was made and significantly more exotic sounds sampled. Even the band’s name is derived from their earliest work, hanging a dictaphone out of a window to capture passing noise and life, be it from a London flat or on the bustling streets of Tokyo. With almost everything on the album produced and mixed by the trio, their creative process is closer to that of electronic producers rather than a traditional band, and the blurring of these boundaries sets them apart. Most of the album was made in hotels and AirBnBs in small breaks between gigs and legs of the tour. “That pushes you to work in a certain way,” Doohan says. “You can hear that in the album. We haven’t just gone to a plush studio.” Instead, the music is about “trying to create the biggest thing with the smallest amount of things possible.” After one US tour, they stole some time in Mexico and ran their cables out to the rooftop of their accommodation to lay tracks down over the view of the valley. The song ‘Enter’ on its own has samples of the Estonian swamp and Mexican mountain weaved in around the skittering shoegaze track, bringing a global and limitless feel to music that sits comfortably in between defined genres or boundaries. Across the album, the band employ thudding synth-pop (‘Storm’), trip-hop (‘Pacifico’), lo-fi pop (‘Lemon Tree Midnight’) and more, and it’s the way the band switch between these modes with abandon – often within the same song – that truly excites. The use of the tapes and heavy sampling also gives Night Tapes’ music a deeply human imperfection, going against the grain of pristine electronic creations on computers. Doohan explains: “We’ll have one tape in the dictaphone, and we'll record fragments of sounds when we're jamming. We’ll press record, record something, and press stop. We have no idea where it is on the tape, and often we'll forget that we recorded it. Later, we’ll be scanning for stuff and I'll just press play, and it will just sweep through all these little fragments of sound. Often some crazy synchronicities will happen, where that particular fragment of sound we recorded six months ago fits perfectly on this new idea. It’s just like an old friend coming back to you in a new context. That never really happens in the digital world, where it’s all too quantifiable.” While the songs on portals//polarities aren’t explicit in their lyrical meaning (“the emotions are in the chords, not in the lyrics,” Vesik says), Night Tapes’ music is still full of meaning, and its nuanced and imperfect edges reflect their thoughts on the world at large. Vesik says: “The album is an exploration of energies and an exploration into my soul. I go into the spectrality of my being and into different polarities within myself. I would like to understand myself and to understand relationships I have with myself and others because I’m trying to change the small things in order to tackle the big ones. I’m just trying to be as honest as possible because lies are prisons. I’m from a country that used to be under authoritarian rule. I am really grateful to have been born in a free country and I value freedom above most things,” the Estonian-born singer, who was in the womb during the Singing Revolution that freed her country, adds.  The personal and political are constantly overlapping on the record, and it’s a mix that makes Night Tapes’ music thrive on humanity and connection. With portals//polarities, they have made an album that dreams big but is defined by how daringly human and real it is, capturing once-in-a-lifetime moments and happy accidents to make music that feels truly, beautifully alive.