Night Tapes are making transportive, truth-seeking dream pop

One night on Night Tapes’ November 2024 US tour, the London trio paid a visit to the rooftop of the Los Angeles hotel they were staying in. They were planning to record vocals for their debut album, ‘Portals // Polarities’, but the session didn’t go as smoothly as they’d have liked – a helicopter started circling above them, thrusting the introverted bedroom-pop band into the middle of a police search. “We were just like, ‘Oh wow, this is what we imagined,’” recalls Iiris Vesik, who, along with bandmate Max Doohan, was experiencing LA for the first time. “Everything was like a cityscape that looked like a video game.”

That’s fitting for Night Tapes. Since their debut single, 2019’s ‘Forever’, the band have released a steady string of EPs, gaining a cult following for their refined dream-pop engineered for midnight drives and wandering neon-lit streets. That’s down to the band’s multi-faceted roles – on top of everyone co-writing the songs, Vesik is the primary vocalist, helping out on synths and flute. Doohan is the drummer, and he and Sam “Richie” Richards often flit between bass, guitar and synths as well. No wonder their sound is so diverse yet still cohesive: they reel off Talk Talk, Jon Hopkins, Björk, Madonna and Flying Lotus as some of their influences.

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.”

“We’re very feeling-based; we try and keep logic out of the equation” – Max Doohan

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…”

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…”

Since teaming up, Night Tapes have entranced listeners with their take on hypnagogic pop. On debut single ‘Forever’, simple lyrics make way for the perfect gauze of its shoegaze instrumental, while ‘Drifting’ earned them their biggest hit so far in 2023 – a year after they’d signed with Nettwerk Music Group. Their music is immersive but never self-indulgent, perhaps owing to the band’s canny instincts. “We’re very feeling-based, we try and keep logic out of the equation,” Doohan explains. All three have had formal musical training, Richards adds; he’s a jazz guitarist, and though he’s pretty knowledgeable about chords, the group usually aims to hit a “ceiling of complexity” – right before the music gets clinical and unemotional.

Though it seemed Night Tapes had initially hit upon a winning formula to finesse their dream pop, their well of inspiration began to dry up as the years went by. Many of the songs on ‘Portals // Polarities’ were written years ago, stretching back to the pandemic. Recent single ‘Pacifico’ hints at their desire to escape stagnation, a reverie about the paradise of San José del Pacifico. The song is a complete fantasy: they have never visited the hillside Mexican town, although Vesik vows to go one day.

Instead, ‘Pacifico’ recalls the band observing their close friend talking about her own trip to the town. “The way that she was so fired up when she was talking about it – it sounded like heaven on earth,” Doohan swoons. “She had such an amazing time, and we were just in London, getting on with songs,” Vesik adds.

At the time, the city that kickstarted the band no longer held the energy they required to finish their debut album, and looming deadlines meant it would have to be finished entirely on the road. As it turns out, that was exactly what they needed. “When you’re in one place doing your usual routes in the outside world, a lot of the time you’re doing the usual routes in your inner world,” Vesik says. “You need to break out of it – awe and joy and nourishment [are] right there for you to access.”

“Trying to find truth and be in the truth, that’s freedom” – Iiris Vesik

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.”

The band’s tour also coincided with some more tumultuous events, resulting in the more urgent tone of the record. On the deceptively soothing ‘Swordsman’, Vesik promises that she’s “not duelling to hurt you” and presents her opponent an ultimatum: “Could you choose me over an idea?”

Just days after they arrived in the US for their November tour, Trump was elected president once again – and when they returned for another run of dates in January, during which time they also finished mixing the album, they watched as he was inaugurated back into office. “Everyone was feeling this, but nobody would talk about it,” Richards admits. “It was tacitly underneath the surface, but you’d walk past protests… I feel like it got in [the music].”

The unrest struck a chord for the group, particularly for Vesik, who was born weeks before Estonia’s four-year Singing Revolution ended in August 1991, marking the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. “Coming from Estonia, the trauma that I see from my parents and from the generations before, I feel like we’ve always talked about the inner life and how to live a better life within yourself,” she says. “I come from a line of hermits. The fact that I’m even in London, on stage and expressing myself – it’s quite different from my family. There’s lots of war traumas that people are still processing.”

“I like the idea that music is always happening, but you choose to tune into it – and that’s just a form of listening to yourself” – Max Doohan

She continues: “Through this album, I feel like one of my lyrical understandings was that actually, there is quite a lot of drama that’s subtly still in some behavioural patterns and stuff like that. I’m very lucky – I’m from a very lovely family, but if you’re at peace within yourself, it’s so much easier to communicate with other people.”

It’s why truth in music is especially vital for Night Tapes. “I can’t really sing anything that doesn’t feel true to me,” Vesik surmises, “because trying to find truth and be in the truth, that’s freedom. To be in any sort of lie is imprisonment that I would like to avoid.”

But for honesty to emerge, one needs trust – and it’s the band’s close friendship that’s preserved Night Tapes’ trademark intimacy, even in their most extroverted work. They recall finally visiting Mexico on tour, which blew away their expectations (“A little bit of us is still there, to be honest,” Doohan chuckles). Stealing away to the mountains of Tepotzlán and perching on a rooftop to record vocals, they remember looking out onto a valley, eagles flying overhead. Vesik says the sight brought Doohan to tears while recording his bass tracks.

“When you’re constantly travelling, those sacred moments that you have with music are even more precious and important to find,” Richards says. He describes music as a “protective shield” that allows them “to escape somewhere when nothing was happening, to imagine somewhere else, and when we’re away, to return to safety”.

“I really like the idea that music is always happening, but you choose to tune into it,” Doohan adds. “And that’s just a form of listening to yourself. It’s always possible – you just have to make space for it.”

Night Tapes’ ‘Portals // Polarities’ is out on September 26 via Nettwerk Music Group.

Listen to Night Tapes’ exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Alex Rigotti
Photography: Jamie Waters
Label: Nettwerk Music Group

The post Night Tapes are making transportive, truth-seeking dream pop appeared first on NME.