Night Tapes – portals//polarities

London based 3-piece Night Tapes release their anticipated debut album portals//polarities, via Nettwerk.

To support the album, the band will embark on a 19-date North American headline tour beginning October 1 in Portlandfollowed an EU/UK tour in November.

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.

Mixing personal and political, Night Tapes’ music thrives on humanity and connection. 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 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,” Estonian-born Iiris, who was in the womb during the Singing Revolution that freed her country, says of the record.

Three electronic producers with a penchant for analogue, Night Tapes exist in a world that is dreamy and widescreen 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 often handbrake turn into dissonant noise or extended ambient sections, blurring the lines between band and studio project in new and exciting ways.

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.

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