Nightbus - Passenger *Pre-Order

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.
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 signalled the duo’s knack for offering listeners a
Bandersnatch approach to hitchhiking their own personal Nightbus in whatever direction they choose to take. “Everyone can have their
moment with our songs; the music is our response to who we are as young people, living in the city full of this energy right now,” they
say.
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.
Recorded at The Nave in Leeds with producer-engineer Alex Greaves (Heavy Lungs, Working Men’s Club), surprise and danger lies in
every crevice. Brooding whispers turn to chants on 6-minute opus ‘Host.’ Improvised when performed live, its immersive shift in tempo
leads to hefty dub courtesy of Jake’s pedals. Even then, you won’t know shit’s hit the fan until its mid-point reveal when ominous bass
blasts a thunderous soundtrack as its protagonist defiantly walks away after committing the perfect crime. “It makes you wait, and more
songs should have sirens,” Olive grins.
Leaning deeper into alter-egos via the video game-psychological horror of a Silent Hill dystopia, the band’s Fight Club moment ‘Angles
Mortz’ turns its literal translation of death angles on its head as it reflects upon kink and internalised shame reincarnated as pride.
Elsewhere the ice cool ‘Landslide’ is a Requiem for a Dream about the addiction of being in a band; ‘The Void’ explores co-dependency
and estranged relationships; and carefully selected samples revive house track ‘Just A Kid’ from the band’s early incarnation.

Passenger’s every direction is to face challenges head on. “That is what’s so great about horror; you can see through predictable
patterns so when the unexpected occurs it's more realistic and uncomfortable… I want to own the dark stuff!”
As for Passenger’s first single, the pulsating ‘Ascension’ is a spiralling deep dive into death, suicide, and legacy around who or what we
leave behind. A noughties club banger by way of NYC beats - ergonomically designed for those who like to stay out a little too often and
too late - it throbs like a house party’s partition wall as the literal levelling up undergoes a neon transformation; blue glitching to pink,
diffusing the white construct of the Nightbus Matrix. “It really does feel like the end of something and was purposely written that way,”
they say, “the ascension is like a firework going off!”
With wheels in motion, Nightbus has become a movement surpassing sonic realms. Between shows from Porto to Brighton taking in
The Great Escape, Rotterdam’s Left Of The Dial and Paris’ Supersonic; DJing; remixing; guesting (BDRMM’s Microtonic album); and
even enlisting talented like-minds to craft a 3-part queer coming-of-age music video series which ties in with a new ‘hyperpop’ phase in
the evolution of their popular Nightbus Soundsystem club night, heads are now being turned from sports brands to high-end fashion
designers. “There are things we can’t reveal just yet,” tells Olive, “but we’re excited about the direction this beast we’ve created is
heading.” As the album philosophises and asks one ultimate question; what does it truly mean to be ‘Passenger’? Nightbus may not
claim to offer a definitive answer, but it might make you feel a bit better about those demons.

Tracklisting
1. Somewhere, Nowhere 2. Angles Mortz 3. False Prophet 4. Fluoride Stare 5. The Void 6. Ascension 7. Just a Kid
8. Host 9.Landslide 10. Renaissance 11. 7am 12. Blue In Grey