Nightbus’s first single, Way Past Three, arrived on Valentine’s Day this year, a gift partway between garage forecourt flowers and a lamb’s heart bleeding out on your front porch. The band behind its melancholic xx-remix-Joy Division sound make “nostalgic but contemporary” music, drawing on post-punk’s bedsit beauty, reimagining it with the digital precision of electronic dance tracks. Not forgetting Nightbus’s silent fourth member, Manchester, the city’s spirit roaming their songs, inspiring the type of music New Order might make if they were 21 today.
Olive Rees (voice, guitar) knew Zac Melrose (bass) from university. They graduated in 2021; the next summer, Rees joined the project Melrose was plotting with housemate Jake Cottier (decks, guitars) and Nightbus was formed. The trio wrote prolifically, originally planning to put out their home recordings themselves. Instead, as soon as labels heard the fruit of their early rehearsals, Nightbus scooped a singles deal – with So Young Records – before they’d played a gig.
Their appeal is easy to grasp. Nightbus songs capture a city in half-light, the Manchester glimpsed through rain-flecked windows on your journey home between chucking-out and sunrise, when the promise of the night is nearly exhausted, to be replaced by the hope of the dawn to come. They’re just back from their first European mini-tour (“Four of us in a Clio with a boot full of music,” says Rees) to play some UK dates. But not for long – that debut album won’t write itself.
Nightbus play Strange Brew, Bristol (19 Nov) and Brudenell Social Club, Leeds (25 Nov), supporting the Orielles
