Through their union of cerebral and contemplative lyrics and hooky and explorative instrumentation, the Belfast rock band Unquiet Nights stood apart in the Irish, British, and European music scenes since their 2010 formation.
They made their name with their 2011 debut album, 21st Century Redemption Songs, which opened the doors for them to appear on Irish, British and Italian radio and television, support Bloc Party in London, and tour Continental Europe and North America.
That album was then followed by their acclaimed 2015 release, Postcards in Real Time. For the rest of the decade, the band focused on releasing singles; a sign of them adapting to the changing musical landscape and its expectations.
In 2022, to celebrate their first albumโs decadal anniversary, the band released a compilation of songs from the first two records (in addition to their singles that were not featured on any album and a new track) for their First Ten 2012-2022 album.
While Unquiet Nights are known primarily as a trio, currently the band only features founding members Luke Mathers on guitar and vocals and Rodger Firmin on drums. Last year, they released the single โDiamond and the Missing Son,โ which was a teaser for their first studio album in almost ten years, Seasons In Exile.
Released in January, Seasons In Exile is a concept album that the two recorded in their then-newly-finished studio, Credential Sound, during the COVID-19 pandemic before Rodger moved to Thailand.
Back in April, Post-Burnout spoke with Luke about the album and its making, the concept behind it, how the musical landscape has changed during Unquiet Nightsโ lifetime, his production work, working with Rodger as he lives abroad, his songwriting processes, and much more.
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Hey, Luke. Howโs it going? Itโs really nice to meet you!
Likewise!
Yeah, I wonโt take up too much of your time; I just had a couple of questions. The first thing I wanted to ask, between this album and the previous album, thereโs been an almost ten-year sabbatical, and the last single prior to [โDiamond and the Missing Sonโ] was in 2019, so itโs been about half a decade since weโve heard from Unquiet Nights. I guess, what have you guys been doing in that time, and whoโs in the band now, and that sort of stuff?
Well, there was a single that we released in 2022, called โDespite It All,โ that was to accompany a compilation of singles called First Ten [2012-2022]. We put out a single in 2022, but between the second album and now, weโve mostly been releasing standalone singles, just because we thought that it benefitted the way the music business was now, to get more traction over a longer period of time. But, yeah, the band kind of exists as a recording project of mine. Whenever I get to be in the same country at the same time as Rodger, we always plan to do something, but we donโt live in the same country anymore, so itโs not a case of constant touring or anything, the way we did some years ago.
Yeah, and I think itโs interesting, thinking about how music has changed a lot. You guys have been around for over a decade now, do you find now, with the advancement of technology, with Zoom โ as weโre doing now โ do you find this has benefited people? Because, obviously, I think a lot of people kind of adapted to a remote means of working during the pandemic, but, in this circumstance, itโs a case where two people are in a different country.
Yeah, well what happened in our case, mostly, was that I had been building a studio in the, say, 2016-โ19 period, and it was more or less finished by the time that the pandemic happened, and Rodger was actually locked down here. So, whenever we were allowed to move about and that kind of thing, I kind of had him captive and I made him drum on as many different tracks as I could, so I probably got about four albums worth of stuff down in that time period, so we donโt really collaborate online in that way; we just kind of chip away at this, ehโฆ
Back catalogue? [Laughs]
Archive, yeah. I mean, the whole Seasons In Exile album came out of just a small portion of what was done in that time, but anytime that we were back in the same country againโฆand heโs going to be drumming on more stuff, whether he likes it or not! Soโฆ
[Laughs] How do you find the changes in music and output since youโve been in a band? Because I think, now, everything is so digital. I mean, obviously, we still live in a resurgence of vinyl – and, actually, cassette tapes, recently – but I think, generally, for most people, weโve moved, in that time, from CDs still [being] kind of in vogue then to everything being digital, really, and I think thatโs beneficial for people who are self-releasing. You know, technology is always going to continue to grow and become more affordable and accessible. I was wondering, from your perspective, how do you find being a musician now differs from when you began the project?
Well, the death of the CD would probably be the storyline over that time period. I mean, some people still want to buy CDs, but I think that theyโre just doing that as a means of being charitable, almost. Like, โWe really want to support you; where can we get the CD?โ But they donโt have to do it, because everyone knows you can get it digitally. So, I would be hesitant to warn other bands about printing too many CDs and being stuck with inventory, because itโs a big amount of capital that way, for a band starting out. Actually, I would ratherโฆThe means of digital delivery, I like a lot, and I wish people spend more money on having decent speakers, rather than spending a lot of money on vinyl or even CDs, but you donโt even have any good speakers to play it through. We put a lot of work into getting masters with a good bass response and everything, and then you hear people saying, โOh, I checked out the album on the phone. It sounded OK.โ Thatโs the part that I find annoying about the current way that music is consumed. Vinyl is obviously a very beautiful medium and we would love to have it, but I canโt seem to make the numbers work.
Yeah, but thatโs always been, I think, the thing, ever since .MP3ย – and even .WAV files, which are meant to be a lot less compressed โ is I think people are going to be first introduced to music – even if they decide to buy the album later – through AirPods, where, particularly the bass, a lot of that information disappears, you know? But itโs a weird thing that, when youโre recording, you still have to have consideration for: โWhatโs it going to sound like on the worst speakers and the best?โ You do a lot of production work, [โฆ] how do you find finding that medium ground?
Well, thatโs probably what the art is, itself, you know? The way that my production style โ if there is one โ a lot of time involves leaving space for the guitars, which means that my basslines or the basslines on Unquiet Nights donโt have that much top, and what that leads to, sometimes, is whenever people are listening on their laptop or a phone or whatever, they just donโt hear the bassline at all. Whereas, I always hope that someone either has a decent set of speakers, or they listen inside a car, or something where they can actually hear it. But you have to accept that people are not listening on good speakers, most of the time, and try and make itโฆI mean, I always reference on the worst speakers that I can find. If it sounds like an OK record on bad speakers, then youโve probably got something OK.
Yeah, [Laughs] actually do you think itโs worth investing in shitty speakers, just to have that frame of reference?
Well, everyoneโs got a phone now, so I donโt really need to! Now, myโฆI have a gaming laptop, so it doesnโt really have good speakers anyway, so Iโve got a good point of reference. Whenever I get the chance to hear our own records through decent speakers, I get quite surprised, myself.
Even then, a lot of the time, you can have high-quality headphones in particular andโฆI know, for example, Beats get a lot of criticism for having too much bass and stuff like that. I donโt know, I can go on a huge tangent about the kinds of equipment you can use, and how the limitations of equipment and stuff can really have an impact, and you can never tell with a hundred per cent certainty what everyone elseโs listening experience is going to be like, but I do think thereโs maybe some level of a centre, in the sense that, you know, lots of people are going to be listening to it on their phone with AirPods, so if you can kind of replicate that, you can get a general idea of what, I guess, the majority of people will hear, but, even then, you never know for certain.
Yeah, Beats Audio โ I had a laptop, before this one, with Beats Audio on it โ and they do process the signal chain, somehow…I donโt really know what it is, but I was referencing it in the studio, in Manor Park Studio, and the producer said to me, โYour laptop is bending that track, sharp,โ and we couldnโt figure out what it was, but it turned out that the native Beats Audio was doing something to the file, trying to make it sound better or whatever it does, but it wasnโt our reference, it wasnโt our mix; it was doing something else to it that it wasnโt really given permission to do, but it was doing it, anyway!
[Laughs] Thatโs always a nightmare, when the software tries to correct what it is youโre doing!
Yeah!
I want to talk, then, about your new record. So, Seasons In Exile came out at the beginning of the year, in January. There was, obviously, a single for it, last year, โDiamond and the Missing Son.โ And it was kind of a reintroduction, I guess, to the band, kind of bringing back the studio album โ obviously, there had been, as you mentioned, a compilation prior to that. I was wondering, what was the process of making this and did it overlap with COVID?
It absolutely overlapped with COVID. We decided to do something for the ten-year anniversary of our first album – which came out in 2012, the start of 2012 โ and we did a bunch of sessions, and the first thing that seemed to come out of it was that track called โIn Spite of It All,โ which we put on the singles compilation because we had three other singles after the second album that were never on any CD or any album, so we put them out as part of the First Ten compilation, and I think we realised after โIn Spite of It All,โ we did try that โDiamond and the Missing Son,โ which was an older song, and sort of in a throwaway method, we were just [like], โLetโs try that,โ and, weirdly, it sounded better than most of the stuff we were working on. So, whenever we heard the mix of that, we decided to go through the COVID period of just jamming. They werenโt even really songs; they were just set to a metronome, and I had this riff, โWhat are you going to play back to me when I play this?โ, and then we had these big, long, extended jams and some of them started to sound like songs or whatever. So, after โIn Spite of It All,โ for the next couple of years, the Seasons In Exile thing started to come together and sound like it would make an album by itself, and here we are!
Thatโs very interesting because I was reading some reviews for the record โ and itโs been getting really good reviews โ and a lot of people have been calling it โCinematic,โ and to have it sort of gradually built, piecemeal like that is very interesting because, in a lot of ways, it seems like a record that, initially, you wouldโve went into with a concept of what the cohesive whole would be, but it wasnโt like that at all, it was more gradual?
Yeah, the song โDiamond and the Missing Sonโ โ you mightโve read me saying this before if youโve been reading the reviews โ but someone close to the band linked their iPhone to the Last.fm database, and then โDiamond and the Missing Son,โ as a song title, came up years ago, even though there was no mix or anything or we hadnโt recorded it. And we had this guy who kept asking, over and over, for a chance to hear the song, so thatโs why we ended up trying it in the studio. And then, whenever we decided we were going to go that way and release it as a single, I thought it might be interesting to extend the story of the two characters in that song over an album. So, we had already recorded most of the tracks, as in bits of music without lyrics and stuff, so it was a case of writing the songs or finding ways to continue the story using the music – whatever excited us, musically, that we had already done. In 2023, nearly all year, we were working on it, but it wasnโt really a case of conventional songwriting, it was moreโฆIt was a totally different thing, of trying to finish the album to spec, the bits and pieces we needed to make the story full, then. So, a lot of music kind of got jettisoned that wouldโve sounded good but it didnโt necessarily fit this project.
Yeah. Actually, what was the recording like? You mentioned that a lot of the drum tracks were already laid down prior to it, but was it done in isolation or was it done collaboratively? Did people send in their pieces? How did the actual recording of the album come about and, actually, the writing, too, for that matter?
Well, Seasons In Exile was only just me and Rodger, essentially. We were the only two musicians on it. We just set up a metronome and this is where we recorded, in our own studio, called Credential Sound, and we just built it at the time of the pandemic, and this was like testing the equipment to see, โWhat sound can we get? If we leave the drum mics set up the way they are, what sound can we achieve?โ And these were just kind of trials, and then we put down all these songs โ I say โsongs,โ they werenโt songs, they were just, โHereโs a riff. Letโs get an A section and letโs get a B sectionโ โ and weโd come out of that. A lot of the time, Rodger wouldโฆWeโd be playing in a pretty straight time signature or whatever, and then, at the end of the song, Iโd be like, โThatโs all Iโve got,โ and Iโd just look at him, and heโd just keep playing, and heโd just try and bend the rhythm, or just play a completely different time signature, and weโd just go off, and these moments would happen that werenโt planned. And then, a lot of those turned out to be actually better than the thing we were working on. The bits where we agreed [to use], a lot of those would end up being a track rather than a song, and then Iโd go away and think about how the lyrics could go over it, to keep this story running. For Seasons In Exile, I had the first song and the last song, which were kind of two bookends, and then it was a case of filling in the eight songs in the middle, to make the story work.
Thatโs very cool! So, when you were working on the songs, did the overall story come naturally to you or was it something that you really had to give a lot of consideration to, and was there a lot of rewriting? How much of it was instinctual and natural and how much of it was an editorial process?
I donโt know if it was more editorial than the way weโd normally do it or the way I would normally do it. I would be kind of obsessive about that stuff, so it did take me all of โ23 to get together, but some of the songs did come pretty easily. I can think of a couple, two or three songs, where I really laboured over them and tried to make sure that there wasnโt any wasted time on the album, that everything flowed song to song, and that every song had a purpose. But, yeah, I did edit some of the songs, quite a bit.
Yeah, and, actually, thatโs one of the major benefits too, I guess, of being the engineer and kind of having that creative control, too, on the postproduction side. Were you still editing the music up until that late stage, or how much of it was done in preproduction and the production itself, and how much of it then was brought over to postproduction to kind of, I guess, trim down to what you wanted?
There are some songs I can think of, like, letโs say, track eight, itโs called โHigh Conviction Play,โ and itโs more or less a linkโฆbecause I had this song, track nine, itโs called โJust Another Sun Going Down,โ [Reading the tracklist] so Iโm going down, and those last two songs were already in place, and I just wanted a link. So, โHigh Conviction Playโ wasโฆRodger was already away back to Thailand by that stage, where he lives, and I just took some drumming that heโd done on something else and pasted it together and made this link, which actually turned into more of a song, and I know that some people have felt that itโs one of the better things on the album. So, that would be an example.
[Laughs] Thatโs really cool, man! I love that idea, of still songwriting in postproduction! Thatโs so cool! [Laughs]
Yeah! I donโt think of it like that anymore, about โpostproductionโ and all that. Whenever youโre involving other people, I suppose the process has to be more like that, but what we wanted, in terms of building our own studio to use was kind ofโฆI like to watch documentaries about the way Genesis put together their albums, and they built this studio called The Farm – and you can find bits and pieces on YouTube about it โ and then they just started recording in the middle of the countryside, and they werenโt involving all the music industry people, and they were just kind of doing it, themselves, and, instead of recording a demo and then going somewhere to professionally redo the demo, and track it and all that, and then you involve six, seven, eight people in the process and putting mics in different places and all that, you lose all the spontaneity of the record. I donโt really like making demos; I like to wait for something toโฆa mood to arise, and youโve already got the record button, itโs already flashing red, so if you do something good, you donโt lose it, itโs right there.
Thatโs so cool. So, everything you do is, as you were mentioning, spontaneous, but I think itโs really interesting to have every process of what youโre doing potentially be recorโฆpotentially end up on a final release, because when I mess around [Laughs] with my own instruments, I like to do it far from the madding crowd and just have my own space and my own time, and I think if thereโs something of merit, I will then record it, but that doesnโt seem to be the case for you; like, anything, potentially, can end up on the final piece, it seems?
It seems to be that way now, yeah. Whenever youโre starting off in bands and things and you donโt have a definite project youโre working towards and youโve got a lot ofโฆThe more people you have involved, obviously, the more complicated itโs going to be because everyone needs to stick their oar into it and, you know, even if theyโre not involved, they need to make themselves more involved, just to justify so many people in a band, but this is just me and Rodger, so I wannaโฆWe have that freedom to just record and use bits and not use other bits. Also, if youโre paying for studio time, the way we used to do it, youโre under a lot of pressure to go in for, say, eight hours and you have to come out with something thatโs going to get on the radio, otherwise youโre just wasting your time and wasting your money, more to the point, but now that we can spend as much time as we want, jamming on something, and if doesnโt work, it doesnโt work; nobodyโs going to hear it. So, the output is totally different because of how we do it.
And one other thing Iโd say is, we donโt have anymore, really, those kinds of centralised forms of having music released, like television, like radio. I mean, obviously, they still exist, but itโs not the end-all, be-all of getting your music out there; I mean, there are so many alternative avenues which are available now. Do you find that has changed the way that you guys have approached music, in the sense that you donโt have to have consideration for what radio will like, as you were mentioning? Definitely. For every release, letโs say every album, Iโve put pressure on myself to try and make sure that there are two or three songs that are going to draw attention to what weโre doing through media exposure, but that leaves room for some tracks where you can just say, โWell, this is the statement I want to make, musically or lyrically or whateverโ and just throw it out there, as long as these other songs get played on the radio or get whatever it is with the medium of the time – get on a Spotify playlist, or whatever it is today โ these other ones, people can like them, eventually, when they get the chance to hear them when they dig into your whole album. Going the independent route as a band allows you to do that as well, because whenever you think of yourself as an unsigned band, to me, that seems that those bandsโ output is determined by what they think the music industry wants, so everything that they record then is to try and impress some A&R man or whatever. Whereas, if you own the term โindependentโ and youโre actually releasing records and doing it without permission, then itโs a totally different process, where you can put out material that isnโt designed to be commercial.
Yeah, I think thatโs a really good point. I guess the final thing Iโll ask is, do you find now withโฆ – as we were mentioning, the kind of decentralisation, and culture, in general, seems very atomised and very dispersed; people donโt really have a lot of ย the cultural epicentres that they once had – do you find that to be liberating or do you find it to be a lot more difficult to get the spotlight?
I suppose itโs easier to get a little bit of a spotlight, to get some kind of avenue where youโre going to be exposed to some people. I even remember a time in music – being involved, myself – where particular radio stations, or TV channels, or whatever, if you were lucky enough to get on them, you were going to be heard or seen by so many more people, so you could get famous overnight, where itโs not quite like that [anymore]. It used to be a case where an act โ say they got on Laterโฆ with Jools Holland or something โ theyโre just going to blow up and theyโre unquestionably going to be one of the biggest acts in Europe or whatever, but it doesnโt even feel like that now. I donโt remember someone telling me, โOh, I saw this great band or singer on Jools Holland.โ I havenโt heard that in ten years.
Yeah, it was also, it was that andโฆoh, what was the other one? Arte in France. If you got on those two, your profile would blow up. But youโre right, I think it is just the times weโre living in, I guess. I guess the final thing Iโll ask is, the album came out in January, [but] what does the future hold for Unquiet Nights, and are you thinking ahead or are you just going to let whatever happens happen without much preplanning?
Thereโs planning in the sense that, for the rest of the year, I have a promotional cycle for this Seasons In Exile album and different spots on the calendar where Iโm hoping other singles will come out and then thereโll be a whole rake of interviews and things to do with that. But the enjoyable part of it, which is the recording and turning out songs, I know that we have some good material and Iโd like to put out a fourth album but Iโm not really working on that that much, at the minute.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Luke. Iโve really enjoyed talking with you. Is there anything youโd like to add before we wrap up, orโฆ?
Oh! Well, Iโd like to add that Iโm very thankful that youโd want to talk with us and that unquietnights.com is where anybody can find out more.
Unquiet Nightsโ latest record, Seasons In Exile, is available now on all streaming platforms. As Luke mentioned, you can find the bandโs music, tour dates, social media accounts, et al. on their website.
Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO,ย Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRDย and more.