Nightlands Announces New LP ‘I Can Feel the Night Around Me’ and Spring Tour

Nightlands, the project of Philadelphia-based Dave Hartley (best known as a core member and longtime bassist of The War On Drugs), will release his third album, I Can Feel the Night Around Me, on May 5th via Western Vinyl. Immediately following, he and his band will head out on a North American tour.

Continuing the tradition of previous Nightlands releases Forget the Mantra (2010) and Oak Island (2013), I Can Feel the Night Around Me showcases Hartley’s ability to layer his voice and conjure some of the most beautiful virtual choirs in modern music. Take album opener and lead single “Lost Moon.” The synths and vocal stacks echo through a canyon illuminated by the light of a billion stars — gaze up long enough and you can make out the shapes of All Things Must Pass, The Beach Boys’ Friends and Hiroshi Satoh’s That Boy.

More literally, the song was written and recorded in an unheated warehouse basement during a record-setting blizzard. “The dissonance between the sound of the album and the atmosphere in which it was recorded is actually pretty striking,” Hartley admits. Indeed, the music seems more geographically inspired by the microclimates of the Lost Coast than the post-industrial cityscape of North Philadelphia.

I Can Feel the Night Around Me uses meticulous choral arrangements and wistful major-seventh chords to evoke a longing for a future that once lay ahead, but has drifted out of reach. Where should a rational man turn when the world seems so increasingly senseless? For Hartley, the answer is a retreat from the cold static of modern life and into the warmth of love and protection.

Hartley has been a fixture in Philadelphia’s music scene for a decade and a half. He has performed his songs as a taut four-piece, a twelve-piece ensemble with a choir and as a one-man-band. Between tours he wrote and performed an original score to Stanley Kubrick’s opus “2001: A Space Odyssey” and remains a prolific collaborator with artists including Sharon Van Etten, Carter Tanton, Torres, Steven A. Clark, Sondre Lerche, The Dove & the Wolf, amongst others.

The Nightlands live band is Dave Hartley on vocals and guitar, Anthony LaMarca (The War On Drugs, Dean & Britta) on drums, Eliza Hardy Jones (Strand of Oaks, Grace Potter an the Nocturnals) on keys and vocals, Jesse Hale Moore on keys and vocals and Scott Churchman (Chubby Checker) on bass.