August has basically been Honestly month here at TDL. With all the excitement building around the duo’s new EP, Dancing After Dark – out today – we just had to get in on the action! Fortunately, we saved the best for last.
In honor of the release of Dancing After Dark, we asked the band to share all the juicy details behind the EP in this exclusive track-by-track commentary, and they definitely delivered! From navigating young relationships to burying your sorrows in the bittersweet joys of the night life to one night stands, no topic goes uncovered as the band releases quite possibly their best work to date!
Enjoy all the fun below and don’t forget to get a special copy of Dancing After Dark on vinyl here!
–
“Après Dusk”
Eric Canto: “Après Dusk” was a poem I wrote about nightlife and what young relationships at the time meant to me. The opening line means a lot of things to me but, I’ll leave it for listeners to hear on their own as I’d love to hear their interpretation of it. It’s quite ambiguous but it also feels like the most relatable idea. I think it opens the concept of the EP very well. Everything’s in there. Both sides of passion. The exciting and the unfortunate.
Dalton Winters: I’ll refrain from divulging too much personal information but Eric loves to observe my life and write about it in extremely personal albeit ambiguous/non-specific ways. This is a textbook example of exploiting me. I’m fine with it.
“Night Life”
EC: “Night Life” is about feeling the same escape in a nightclub as you would in your bedroom. I found it very ironic because one is in complete isolation and the other suggests being in the most crowded room(s). Somehow, for a moment they both mean the same thing. I was using both to cope with stressors/depression. If they were to be personified you’d probably say that both scenarios are accepting, both an outlet for escape. They’re both “night life.” The inspiration came when we were visiting friends in New York. I was struggling with a relationship and found myself disassociated from my friends at the club. The next day I felt so depressed and anxious about returning home and about facing the things I had waiting for me (one of which was writing this song). I cataloged a mad stream of consciousness in my notes app on the bus home. I thought the line, “I want to be alone so badly,” sounded desperate and honest. It held more than one meaning. I was struggling for months to write words to this song to the point that it began stressing me out. After I got back to MA, I wrote the whole song all in an hour. It’s the most vulnerable song on the album. It’s my favorite song right now.
“Tourist”
EC: “Tourist” is a song about the empty emotions associated with one night stands. I’ve only had 2 one night stands – one in LA, the other in NY. I thought that duality was interesting and decided to reserve a verse for each of them. I thought of the metaphor of being a tourist or somebody’s body and how it is similar to staying a night in a hotel or vacationing somewhere for one night only. Ironically, that is exactly what I was doing when visiting LA and NY. Connecting the subject matter to traveling was necessary, the metaphor just made sense. This girl in NY was on a business trip at the time and that also served as a vehicle for another metaphor. It came together pretty naturally. My favorite line is, “if it’s foreign, it’s exciting.” I think any semi-extroverted young person can relate to that. That’s exactly what gets you in these situations where you make decisions out of impulse. This song is about both sides of impulsivity; the initial serotonin boost and the shame thereafter. It’s about reconciling that shame.
“Let This Be Love”
EC: “Let This Be Love” came about after observing a relationship between friends of ours. They would always hook up and seemingly be a unit in public, at parties, at local bars, etc. It was casual, but it was rumored that the boy became very into her and she had to remind him of what they were and weren’t. I don’t know if that was true but I turned it into a greater story from the boy’s perspective. A story about wanting more from an inevitably transient, friends-with-benefits relationship that seems to only flourish in public and party scenes. I could relate to this deeply. I wrote the original version of this song 2 years ago, from my own perspective. It had very different lyrics but the same overarching theme and song title. I think anyone in their 20s even somewhat surrounded by the party scene has had an experience like this one. Sexual relationships where are no rules…except one; we cannot under any circumstances let this be something greater than sex. It’s a very lovesick thing. That’s what this song is. It’s lovesick.
DW: I’ll comment on the instrumental of the song, as it’s quite different from the majority of our discography. Many of our influences lie outside of the “indie-pop” genre and instead exist in genres like shoegaze, drone, emo, and good ole’ indie rock. I love messy, noisy guitars but they usually don’t fit into our songs except for as layers, or in outtros. I wanted to write a lead guitar riff that was just raw and saturated that made me feel like a shoegaze band from the mid 00’s playing in a grimy beer-soaked club. I literally put every distortion pedal I could on my pedalboard and went to town. Eric added some pretty, extended, piano-esq chords underneath the lead and a nice fuzzy live bass and voila! We finally had a raw indie-rock song under our belts. I’m particularly excited to play this one live.
“Royale”
EC: “Royale” is a song we wrote about a night out at a Boston club of the same name. We were out with a group of friends and one of the girls was very intoxicated. She had a boyfriend, but that didn’t stop her from dancing, kissing, and flirting with a boy on the dancefloor. The whole engagement was eyebrow-raising and silly. We extrapolated a story from that night and decided to write from the perspective of that boy she was courting. It was the first time we wrote a song from a fictitious third-party perspective and it was quite fun. It was a very fluid, natural thing. I love that there is no deliberate chorus or overtly repetitive structure. It serves as a nice break from all the pop songs. It feels very Tep No meets BANKS… how much more vibey can you get really?
“Mariel”
EC: “Mariel” is named after a night club in Boston and it’s about the best date I’ve ever had. This is a proper R&B song but with a tropical house rhythm. It’s both literal and figurative. The line about “swerving lanes” is a reference to a quote I’ve heard about comparing the romantic instincts of boys and girls to driving on a highway. Boys are speeding, switching lanes, gazing at billboards and such. Girls are “10 and 2.” That was my experience on this particular date, at least. My favorite lyric is the 2nd verse: “Spilling Clase Azul on my viscose shirt…” and “I think I’ve loved you forever but it’s only been 2 days”— it’s very literal to that moment in my life. I felt like I was on a speeding train headed for the best thing to ever happen to me. This song outlines everything from the moment I bought that figurative train ticket, to the arrival at its destination. After that chapter in my life ended it was very hard for me to listen to this song, so I listened to it every day for a week until that’s all it was— a song. It’s still my favorite love song I’ve ever written and I love how it affected me so deeply. It’s all in the details. I was in love when I recorded this song. That’s my voice in love. Every word bestows conviction. I hope it takes people somewhere as much as it did me. There’s a version of this song on the vinyl release with an extended vocal outro. There’s a line that says “I’m elated I know you.” That’s still difficult to listen to. I knew her. I don’t anymore.
“Gin & Too Far”
EC: Dalton told me that the outro of this song is his favorite moment in all of our music so far and that’s very special to me. We frequently use big emotive guitar moments in our music as an ode or reference to our roots in emo and post-rock music. Those extended guitar chords breaking up with distortion against the extremely aggressive half-time drums is something that has always made us feel alive. Although this record is deeply rooted in dance music and that scene, we figured why not? It’s an honest expression and further exercises our experimentation with music. That’s what this is all about. We’re very proud of this song.
DW: This track is about trying to take a platonic friendship into a physical, sexual place, and ruining a friendship in the process. The track title is in reference to the drink gin and tonic with the entendre of “taking things too far.” The irony of coed friendships is that sometimes you can both be simultaneously intoxicatingly attracted to each other and still aware enough to apprehend yourself acting on those feelings – sometimes though, feelings still get hurt or misinterpreted, and ‘poof’ goes the friendship. This song is very referential for me, and still makes me quite sad. It’s always hard to lose a friend, especially when your intentions are to try and salvage the relationship before it goes too far. It’s my favorite song on the EP. I think it has a great mix of pained emotive vocals, intense and dynamic instrumentation, and our favorite “left turn outro” into a post-rock breakdown type climax.
–
