FEATURE:
Spotlight
2024 interviews with Night Tapes before getting to some newer chats. First, I want to feature The Honey Pop and their interview from last June. I am quite new to Night Tapes, so it is helpful looking back at previous interviews and seeing where they have come from. You can tell the London-based trio of Max Doohan, Sam Richards and Iiris Vesik. If you have not yet discovered the trio then I would thoroughly recommend them:
“Your previous EP, Perfect Kindness, is something we can never get enough of. We’re obsessed with the ethereal energy in both the instrumentals and vocals. Each track is its own perfect vibe/journey. Can you tell us a bit about the creation process of the Perfect Kindness EP?
Ah, that’s nice. It took quite a long time and meticulous crafting of the whole EP. We had time to make 20 versions of everything. For example, there were like 20 versions of ‘Inigo’ before its final form.
Perfect Kindness came together more as a collage. Some of these songs like ‘Selene’ and ‘Humans’ were made after Richie heard them in his dreams. Silent Song was a process from 2016-2022 – it started as a piano song and then re-emerged when Max found a loop that we all had jammed on with drums, synths, and flute. The topline just fit and suddenly everything made sense.
We used to all live together in a house back then and flitter between each other’s rooms when anyone had a cool idea going. We used to have lots of random jams together and recorded them onto tape in our bedroom studios. We still have hundreds of little demos from that time and occasionally we’ll go through them for textures and vibes.
Speaking of creating an EP, how would you compare the process of creating Perfect Kindness to the creation of your new EP, assisted memories?
Both were created in our living quarters. Perfect Kindness was made in bedrooms while assisted memories were made mostly in living rooms and corridors.
Perfect Kindness took a long time to create and assisted memories came together quite fast. We really had years to reopen the projects on Perfect Kindness whilst with assisted memories we had a deadline for the first time.
For me the 2 EP’s have quite a yin & yang energy going on. Perfect Kindness is definitely yin: nighttime listening, wandering and experimenting. assisted memories is quite yang: it’s more directional and punchy, the songs feel to me like crystallized snowflakes.
In terms of making assisted memories, everything that we had learned whilst making perfect kindness we could refine and put into (fast) practice with assisted memories. I’m also really proud to see how the songs that Max and Richie mixed turned out. We are so happy that for both of these EPs for specific songs we got to work with the mix wizard Nathan Boddy, he really elevated the tracks he worked on.
The EPs are going to be on double vinyl together when the new assisted memories comes out.
The genre of “dream pop” is so fitting for your sound, in our opinion! What are some of the influences/genres/artists that helped bring you to the sound you have today?
Ah! That’s nice to hear, yeah we love dreamy ethereal stuff but our backgrounds are actually more electronic. We hadn’t really listened to Cocteau Twins before people started to reference them in comparison to us. We do love Tame Impala and Deerhunter, but I wouldn’t say that we listen to dream pop usually.
I have always been a Björk, Bowie, Kate Bush Holy Trinity fangirl & at the moment I’m actually listening to a lot of dance music, future breakbeat & I’ve been discovering UK jungle & garage gems. I was the one to bring the boys over to the dark side and now they also love pop music. But they’re probably not as into Charlie Puth as I am. I always try to keep an open mind about new music, I’m always on the prowl for some.
Richie probably is the most indie of us all, loves Bon Iver and Big Thief. But when I met him then he was making more electronic dance music and house music. He is big into his chord sequences and he has a jazz guitar degree.
Max has always been an ambient music lover – Brian Eno, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Lone, and such. When I met him, he was making ambient-infused electronic dance music. He is big into drones. He also plays drums in a post-rock/electronic indie band and he is sessioning top-level R&B bass at the moment”.
I am going to move on to UNCLEAR and their interview with Night Tapes. Speaking with the three-piece around assisted memories and its success, it was a big step for them. This year has seen incredible singles such as helix and storm. This is a group with a massive future ahead. Although I have not known about them for too long, I can see there is a lot of excitement around them:
“What is your writing/production process typically like? Did you try any new methods or styles within this process recently?
Night Tapes: “Our writing process is pretty erratic. We all make tracks individually and we can write together. The annoying, correct answer to this question is ‘every time is different’ ([laughs] I used to absolutely loathe these kinds of answers, but it’s so true). I think it’s good to keep on exploring, there is a saying that applies to art quite well: ‘if you think you know what you’re doing, you’ve killed it.’ Throughout the years we have learned to just make songs happen faster, but switching up approaches like writing with a new instrument or writing to visuals seems to work for us.”
If you each had to choose a favorite track from this EP, which would it be and why?
Night Tapes: “At the moment my fave is ‘easy time to be alive.’ It’s built on this one spontaneous dictaphone recording we did one morning with Max. We found the recording randomly at a session and built everything around it as we couldn’t change anything about it. It turned out everything was there, we just needed to trust the first recording and the first feeling it had.”
This fall, you’ll be on your debut US tour including shows in NYC and LA! Which part of this tour are you most excited for?
Night Tapes: “We are so excited to see all the new cities we’ve never been to before (Chicago and San Francisco). We are also very excited to see the people who have been championing us online.”
What do you want to tell your future, end-of-this-year self? What do you hope you’ve accomplished individually and as a group by December 31st?
Night Tapes: “I would like to tell my future end-of-this-year self that creativity needs order and chaos and I hope she will go to a sunny place this winter to rest, regroup and adventure. I would like to accomplish inner freedom, thank you”.
I am going to move to this year. On 26th September, Night Tapes release their debut album, portals//polarities. After a series of E.P.s and singles, this is the first definitive and full work from Night Tapes. I am writing this on 15th September, so I am not sure what the reviews are like for the album. We will soon find out. The Line of Best Fit spoke with the trio in August. It is a fascinating interview. Starly Lou Riggs spent time with a trio who are creating their own sound and niche. The Line of Best Fit say that “Instead of heading to bed after performing, Night Tapes wrote an entirely new album on their last tour. Born in hotel rooms on the road, it finds Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan, and Sam “Richie” Richards cracking the code on how to capture a moment in time with sound”:
“Night Tapes are all about vibes. More specifically, they’re about organic feeling and expression. Each of these tracks tells the story of a time and place, serving as a diverse array of sounds and mapping the band’s sonic dreamscape – from sun-laced dance hits about a screen-obsessed world (“television”) to more seedy city grit (“leave it all behind, Mike”), the album feels like riding a virtual wave of both soft and heavy currents.
Sitting atop Doohan and Richards’ hypnotic instrumentals, Vesik’s whispered vocals act as a teleportation device. Amid twisting tones that feel weightless, tracks like “tokyo sway” and “masterplan” feel like a journey to another dimension – one entwined in VHS-tape ribbon and a blue crackling screen. The heavy-hitting punchy beats of delicate trip-hop track “babygirl (like n01 else)” juxtapose with Vesik’s syrupy vocals. From “enter” to “wayfarer”, Night Tapes invite nostalgia without going backwards in time. Instead, they’re bridging the gap, bringing together both inner and outer worlds.
In general, electronic music has an air of being “perfected.” When polished and tuned, live instrumental tracking sometimes disappears. Night Tapes, however, bend these expectations by tracking with both messy and masterly methods. “When we capture the recordings – the raw recordings – that’s not precise,” Doohan clarifies. “But then we [go] through everything with a fine-toothed comb and apply that electronic production mindset to these imperfect things.” The resulting sound is something a bit in between, capturing the human behind the computerboard.
PHOTO CREDIT: Marii Kiisk
To simply call the band “electronic” does them a disservice. Their work feels more like a lucid dream, breathing new life into the familiar sounds of shoegaze, synth-pop, and trip-hop, gripping a ‘90s backdrop while looking into the future. On top of it all, they write everything improvisationally. Whether at home or abroad, the process is so wonderfully collaborative that they sometimes forget who wrote which line. Doohan laughs, “There are some bass lines that I’ll play the first half of and then Richie will play the second half, maybe slightly overlaying each other, so they’re actually kind of impossible to play!” Later, they have to relearn each track to play live as a band, pulling from recordings and fitting them together again like puzzle pieces.
They’ve been so successfully locked in with conceptual EPs, it’s landed them tours across the globe and over 18 million streams. While a lot of their inspiration still stems from London, the group got a fresh wave of inspiration out on the road post-pandemic lockdown. In the end, Vesik explains, “We tried writing at home for quite a long time before, and it all just came together on tour.”
Lit by a new match, Vesik, Doohan, and Richards were able to find new inspiration in the very places they dreamt of visiting. After kicking off the dust of pandemic restlessness, Richards notices that “the songs were a way of escaping the mundanity of being in London and being inside. We were lucky we could be together to write that, but a lot of the time, it’s as if we’re somewhere else.” They had hoped to visit Mexico, even writing “pacifico” about the city of San José del Pacifico before ever setting foot in the country. The track serves instead as a daydream, depicting a place their friend had visited and told them about”.
I am going to end in a minute. The final interview is from NME. Transporting and deep Pop, Night Tapes put their feelings very much first when it comes to their music. NME observed how the trio infuse and pack their songs with “vitality, emotion and the spirit of their travels”. The brilliant and anticipated portals//polarities is one of the most essential, important debut albums of this year. I recently published a mixtape with songs from incredible debut albums. That was before portals//polarities came out. I think that this album will get an honourable mention:
“While ‘Portals // Polarities’ continues their knack for gliding melodies and synths that practically glow, it also pivots towards trip hop, breakbeat and acid house – in part, thanks to Doohan’s more recent interest in dance music. “Because we’re always trying to react to each other, somebody might bring something which is really far outside that direction,” Richards explains when NME meets the band in more familiar territory – dialling in from their south London house-share, not long after wrapping up their Cover photoshoot. “Then, we always try to understand what makes it sound like Night Tapes and catch it.”
But for a band whose work remains so intimate and spectral, ‘Portals // Polarities’ is “probably the most extroverted work we’ve done”. “The beginning of Night Tapes was more introverted and slower, but our lives were also slower,” Vesik admits. “Everything’s going so fast now. It’s like, whirr! It’s interesting to capture the snapshots.”
London seemed like an endless font of inspiration when Night Tapes began. It was a change of pace from the band’s backgrounds: Doohan and Richards hail from rural towns around the New Forest, while Vesik is from Tallinn, Estonia, and moved to London a decade ago to pursue music. “I guess I was always quite expressive – the usual!” she cackles, bold red lipstick marks streaked across her cheeks from the photoshoot. “We have a certain stereotype of Estonians,” she adds, referencing the country’s aloof image, “which I believe is not true. We have a very rich inner life – we might not always share it…”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Waters for NME
Doohan and Vesik met at university and started living together, with Richards joining them later in 2016. Initially, all three pursued their own musical projects, but soon began jamming together at night. When they eventually recorded their 2019 debut EP ‘Dream Forever In Glorious Stereo’, they did so at hushed volumes, so as not to disturb their neighbours. “There’s a lot of collective consciousness – there’s so many dreams and thoughts in London,” Doohan says. “It’s a very powerful, buzzing energy. It’s very inspiring because of that – if you can tap into it and not go crazy…”
Though Night Tapes’ sound is mired in escapism and fantasy, there’s an unusually strong duty to truth on multiple levels. Across the album, you’ll hear a multitude of samples recorded during their tours from November 2024 to January 2025. Most of their vocals were recorded in situ straight into an iPhone, and the band would later craft songs around specific samples, exploring juxtaposing textures and soundscapes to build their worlds.
‘Enter’, for instance, evokes an eerie, surreal limbo, pairing a dampened digital drum kit with strummed acoustic guitars recorded in an Estonian swamp. Meanwhile, those LA helicopters turn ‘Leave It All Behind, Mike’ into a dystopian high-stakes escapade, despite its dreamy ’80s instrumentals: “If the world is ending / Would you share with me our last strawberry?”
“You can have a very simple song, but if you put the sound of a cityscape over the top of it, it completely recontextualises it,” Doohan explains. “You can frame the song differently depending on what kind of foley you use behind it”.
This is a very important time for Night Tapes. With a debut album about to come out (though it will be out by the time this feature is shared), there are some great dates coming up. The trio head to North America for a string of dates. They have so many fans around the world. That will only build and expand as portals//polarities comes out and gets all this love. For those who are unaware of Night Tapes, make sure you add them to your collection. A trio who make music…
THAT is truly unforgettable.
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