‘Your mother doesn’t love ya / She didn’t wanna have you / Forgot to wear a rubber / And now we have to suffer’ are lyrics from Sad Night Dynamite’s latest single, ‘Sick of Your Sound’, which was originally written to soundtrack an upcoming Disney movie. “We were approached by Disney to do a song. They told us the one thing we can’t do is be offensive - this is a kid’s film, they said, so write with that in mind,” explains one half of the London-based duo Josh Greacen. “It was a fight scene that we were scoring so it needed to be angsty. We wrote the lyrics unchanged as you hear them now and in our heads that was tame. We didn’t even swear. But weirdly we never heard back from the film.”
“We threaten to break someone’s legs and put them in a coffin…I can’t see why they didn’t go for it,” adds bandmate Archie Blagden. The pair grew up together in Somerset on the outskirts of Glastonbury and started making music whilst still in school. Having spent the most part of their childhoods together, they officially formed Sad Night Dynamite in 2020 and released their first EP the same year. Since then, they’ve racked up millions of streams, supported Glass Animals on tour and even got a Gorillaz stamp of approval via Noodle’s Spotify playlist. There was also the almost-Disney moment, though this wasn’t the first time an opportunity has slipped through their fingers: “This has been a running theme for us. We’ve missed out on other opportunities because we send people the lyrics and they go ‘what the f*ck?’” Greacen explains.
When you’re making a record, influences are all it is. They’re what make it good or bad. It’s the ingredients you’re pulling from
Their sound jumps between genres, making it difficult to draw immediate comparisons with other artists. You can hear that they grew up listening to Kendrick Lamar and Gorillaz, but exist somewhere between the realms of The Streets and Aphex Twin. The underlying, unsettling, sound that pulls it all together is darkness. “Our music is this wild animal that actually needs to be tamed a little bit” says Greacen. “We’re now in the process of writing our album and it’s nearly there. But it’s like being on the back of a wild animal and we don’t have any control over where it goes. We definitely have a pull towards the darker things and the weirder things. That’s what our souls would say. At our core is the darkness.”
Their personal influences are constantly evolving and growing with them, but now they’re trying something new: blocking it all out. “When you’re making a record, influences are all it is. They’re what make it good or bad. It’s the ingredients you’re pulling from and it’s easy to be inspired by the wrong influences. Recently we’ve been loving a lot of Eastern European traveller music, but then also just getting inspired by what we do best. We’ve always been influenced by other people, but if you can block all that out, you can create stuff that has your own sound.”
Eager fans are impatiently awaiting Sad Night Dynamite’s debut album, which they confirm, is very much on the way. Even if we don’t get the full album this year, we’ll certainly have the announcement of one. “We’ve got these ride or die fans who really want to hear the album, but there’s a lot that we just haven’t been totally happy with, the album process has been really healthy. We’re getting to the point now where we’re like, this is what the album is. I cannot wait, it’s going to be our best work. It just takes time to get it right.”
When it comes to their ideal Friday night, these city boys dream of the Devonshire coastline: “I love the sea. Put me on a boat with maybe a hundred models. Somewhere a bit f*cking weird, f*ck going to Monaco let’s go to Plymouth. A dinghy with models on, off the coast of Plymouth.” Read on to discover the soundtrack to their nautical night out…listen to the full playlist here.
The Prodigy - Firestarter
Josh Greacen: “Firestarter, it’s just the perfect message for your Friday night isn’t it, lighting some sort of fire. I have to say, I never go out or do anything fun so I don’t know why I’ve picked it. We were definitely channelling a bit of Prodigy energy on our last single, Sick of Your Sound.”
Kendrick Lamar - Alright
Greacen: “Archie and I have always been obsessed with this album, we listened to it when we were 15 or 16 and it’s the first album we really connected together on. We got to see him live at Glastonbury and people around us were going “I don’t know this one.” I made a fool out of myself because I couldn’t control myself, I was screaming and acting like a baby.”
Kraftwerk - The Model
Greacen: “It’s a very poised song. I know it’s German as f*ck but it’s got a really English feel. Something about it just makes me think of Shaun of the Dead and it’s fun to be in that mood on a Friday night. The Shaun of the Dead mood, world’s going to end, that kind of thing.”
audiobooks - The Doll
Archie Blagden: “They’re f*cking sick. These are a duo and the front girl is a devout Christian who tells these amazing stories through her music, this one is about a little girl who has lost her doll. The other half of the duo is this long-haired-looking-wizard-man who’s in his fifties. It’s everything that music should be, totally f*cking bizarre.”
Paleman - Beezeldub
Blagden: “I imagine this is the song they play in hell on repeat. If hell was sick. It’s hot, everyone’s sweating, there aren’t a lot of clothes but there are a lot of fluids - if that was hell. When we were at school together, this is one of the songs we would play at every party.”
