One of the reasons that Sad Night Dynamite’s debut album is such a thrilling listen is that Josh Greacen and Archie Blagden, the old school friends behind the project, weren’t really sure what they were making until they got to the end of it. “I don’t think we ever had a moment where we were like, ‘I see what this is’,” Greacen tells Apple Music. “It’s one of those records that’s deliberately erratic—it’s called Welcome the Night and it’s literally about being lost, trying to fumble around in the dark.” With featured guests including BERWYN and Yung Kayo, it’s an album that perfects the slick beats and mellifluous hooks of the Glastonbury duo’s two mixtapes, melding influences as diverse as Timbaland, The Pogues, Gorillaz and The Specials into shapeshifting, lithe future pop. These are songs that the pair have poured their heart and soul into. “I get emotional about some of these songs because they’re highly personal and I realised that Archie is talking about himself,” says Greacen. “He’s not saying, ‘I’, he’s talking about someone else, but actually he’s talking to himself. That makes me quite emotional. You don’t realise [it but] sometimes the songs you’re writing when you think about other people, you’re actually writing about yourself.” It’s a record that captures an era of confusion and coming of age for Greacen and Blagden, both still in their early twenties, an album that, at its heart, is about trying to find human connection. Let Greacen be your guide for a track-by-track excursion into a surreal, startling debut. “If You Walk” “This is one of the last songs that we wrote. It was January, and I had a broken wrist and we were done in with this album and then this sample came along and it was saying, ‘Walk with me through the long and lonely night.’ It was like this thing had been beamed down from heaven, like the perfect invitation for the listener to come with us. The album is about welcoming the darkness, it’s about embracing the unknown. Life is full of chaos and uncertainty, and it’s certainly absurd, so we wanted the listener to feel like maybe they’re feeling lost when they hear this and it’s kind of us offering a hand to them. Not saying that everything’s going to be fine, but it’s just like, ‘Let’s just go through this.’” “Godfather” (with Yung Kayo) “This is more of a callback to our old selves, but it’s similar in the sense that it’s dark but uplifting. ‘Family is forever’ is kind of the motto of this song and SND has always felt like a bit of a family to us. We are not really ones to be very happy-clappy so we had to do it in an SND-world way. This was us trying to reconnect. We’ve been away for so long writing this album and this was us saying, ‘We’re still here, we’re still around.’ It is obviously a flip on a Mafia saying, and the lyrics are very sort of Mafia-esque, but that was the vibe.” “Wake Up, Pass Out” “We were right in the middle of this album and getting hit from all ends. The world was this big mess, and we were a big fucking mess. This is just a stream of consciousness. It’s about being stuck in a cycle, which I think everyone suffers from sometimes. We’re creatures of habit. It’s really hard to break habits, and that’s what this really is about, but then there’s these fleeting messages of desperation throughout about the world and politics and various human pitfalls. It’s deliberately erratic. I don’t think either of us feel like we’re at the point where we can put together an incredibly deep, thoughtful answer to the questions that we’re really asking in these songs, it’s more a knee-jerk reaction to the world that we see.” “Onto the Next One” (with Aby Coulibaly) “This one is an uplifting song but with darkness threaded into it. It’s about never giving up. I think everyone faces adversity, obviously it’s all relative, and I think we’ve been lucky in our lives to not have that much adversity, but it’s about moving on, being grateful for the experience of life. It’s easy to get down, but when you get down that’s when you’re in real trouble. That’s when you need to keep swimming.” “Mrs Dior” “This is about a toxic relationship, unrequited love, what could have been, believing in a fantasy, believing in someone or something that doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been doing this whole campaign with a sugar mum and she is Mrs Dior, and it’s very meta, it’s not real. People really thought it was real. People don’t like absurdity and they don’t like being misled, and that’s what we’ve been doing a lot of because this whole album is about irony and absurdity and life being those things and people struggle with it. The internet isn’t a place for irony, and that’s what Sad Night is.” “Who Do You Think You Are?” “This is a peek down the rabbit hole of existentialism. It’s a character that’s having really erratic dark thoughts. The hook was written by [Georgia alt-R&B singer-songwriter] Kareen Lomax, and I think her interpretation of lyrics would be completely different, but ‘Who do you think you are? You’re a star’—to us, it was interesting if we could paint that in a dark way, this person thinks that he’s somebody, someone important, but perhaps not in a good way. It’s kind of nihilistic and he wants to make an impact that feels forgotten, this character.” “Welcome the Night” “This was originally going to be the intro, but it felt really good halfway as we needed a re-energiser at that point, especially going into ‘Dying of Thirst’. This is just a reintroduction of the theme of the album and a reminder of what we are doing. It’s a bit more of a celebration at this point, but obviously it’s still really dark and then you’ve got that big end. It’s not particularly profound, it’s more just things happening in the dark. It’s not particularly profound, but it sums up the album.” “Dying of Thirst” “This was the opposite of ‘Wake Up, Pass Out’. That was us really trying to shoot for pop, and ‘Dying of Thirst’ came about a year later and we were sick of that whole world. We were metaphorically dying of thirst in terms of our influences and in terms of feeling quite unfulfilled with the world around us musically and possibly us with some of the work that we’d made. I think we say ‘dying of thirst’ about a hundred times in this song and that’s kind of the point. There was no filter, there was no dressing it up, it was just us trying to get this feeling of feeling completely desperate for something with meaning in our world.” “White Lie” (with BERWYN) “This one’s a funny one. It just fell out of us in a day. The whole song was written in a day, and I think we’re still understanding where it came from now and some of the lyrics are making a lot more sense. But I certainly think it’s about male tendencies to bottle things up. It’s about trying to move on from something really painful. This one, for me, is becoming more and more a favourite. At the time, I wasn’t really interested, and now it seems to have more relevance in my life than ever.” “Sugabby” “This is Archie in another desperation. He was like, ‘Well, what do I really want right now? I want someone that can fix all my problems, a fairy godmother to come into my life with a load of money.’ We have a lot of friends who are maybe more inclined to do stuff like that, and this was Archie being like, ‘Well, why can’t I do it?’ And out came this sort of pop number which then spiralled into me having a fake relationship online with this amazing person called Mrs Dior. It was a nice way of giving the album a world.” “High Road” “This is about pretending to be someone that you are not. I think it’s a deeply personal song for Archie. We see it a lot in other people and, when we were writing this, Archie was probably talking about other people, but it feels quite connected to him as well and trying to work out who you are and feeling like a lot of the time we go through life sort of smiling and being polite and not really understanding who’s underneath. It’s about that sort of ticking time bomb. You can only suppress things for so long and this song is kind of encouraging you to embrace the real you, whoever it is.” “Knife in the Mud” “I think it’s quite deeply personal to Archie, and it’s uplifting, but also very melancholy. I mean, the message is so pessimistic—life is a fight for the knife in the mud—but it’s being sung in an uplifting manner of just accepting that and almost accepting that is comforting in this setting, and being OK with that and embracing your flaws and trying to fight for that knife in the mud. There’s a feeling of optimism from it but it’s making no promises, and I think it’s kind of where Sad Night is at the moment. The future is uncertain and this song felt like it had the right tone for what’s next.”