For their final stop before they arrive at their debut album next month, Nightbus are sharing a new single “Landslide“, an ice cool Requiem for a Dream about the addiction of being in a band.
On the track Olive says:
“Landslide was written about Nightbus and our journey within this band. I have never pursued something more addictive in my life but sometimes the emotional and physical toll is high. How long do you keep chasing a dream , before the dream becomes a nightmare? A nightmare that’s a fantasy, legacy and reality.”
Flickering in ultraviolet, there is an elusive place where blue pill meets red, ups become downs, and day merges with night. Those liminal spaces where anything is possible is where you’ll find Nightbus and their hypnotic debut album Passenger. Doom, uncertainty, and opportunity lurk in the shadowy corners of their murky existence with stops at disassociation, co-dependency, and addiction before reaching its final destination – a glimmer of hope.
“We’re travelers in our own bodies; there’s an alter-ego nurturing our secrets, fantasies, shame, and fears, lost in the underworld of humanity. A dreamscape of tabu existence, things that define us but wouldn’t come up in casual conversations. This album is that traveller, the passenger,” Olive Rees reveals, who, alongside partner-in-crime Jake Cottier, is Nightbus. “This self-destructive side can be triggered at any moment, and you’ll experience life in a completely different light. It’s not about hiding that side, but if it were gone, what journey would it experience?”
The in-between of Nightbus’ own Gotham lies where Manchester’s city pulse meets Stockport’s outer realm. An audio-visual entity formed among a musical family of friends, freaks, and foes in messy mills and after hours on dancefloors alike, their sound bleeds from tension where collective creative forces are bound together and collide with the fallout of being torn apart. Before even playing a show, their So Young released single ‘Mirrors’ – a knowing nod of respect to some well-known gloomy Northerners – may have made old school indie heads shimmy at shows in Salford’s The White Hotel but also signaled the duo’s knack for offering listeners a Bandersnatch approach to hitchhiking their own personal Nightbus in whatever direction they choose to take.
Whilst reverb hefty melodies and dread-filled loops embody isolation from writing at each of their home studio set-ups, magic happens in the ether across 90s trip-hop, indie sleaze and electronica; Jake’s production layers Olive’s pop sentimentality with drums and samples whilst tales of a cast of faceless characters place Olive as puppet master; her severed self’s perspective manipulating their stringed limbs at arm’s length to see how their stories play out when scenes reflecting her own lie close to the bone. “It’s a bit fucked; like having this out of body experience with a made-up movie running through my head,” she says. “As I write I can see they’re all from a similar world, but they allow me to explore different feelings without giving away part of myself.”
