Introducing: NITEFIRE
The Instagram "explore" page can be a real ball-ache. On those days when your social media life is dead, your friends aren't messaging you and reloading your feed is achieving nothing then you should be able to put down your phone and walk away. However, that's when the "explore" page grabs hold of you and starts screaming "LOOK AT ME - OVER HERE". Before you know it you're scrolling through endless posts by people you don't...and probably never will...follow and you've wasted the best part of a day looking at absolutely nothing. It's the work of the devil - apart from those rare instances of when it allows you to actually discover something.
Which is exactly what happened to me. Despite not being its biggest fan, without it I would never have stumbled across the lovely Nitefire. Made up of two Californians, Luke and Nico, Nitefire is a beautiful baby of a band. With only one single out at the moment, (released just over a month ago) they already have over 20K plays on Spotify which is no mean feat. According to this ever accurate, tried-and-tested formula for greatness it seems they are well on their way.
LB: What are your names & roles in the band?
Luke: I’m Luke White and I play bass and keys. Some people call me Spider. Do with that what you will…
Nico: I’m Nico Geyer and I sing and play guitar.
How did you guys meet?
Nico: Well we first met in high school, and weren't really friends. We had the same friends and we would hang out a lot because of that but we weren't close.
Luke: Yeah it was often an awkward situation where we would be with a mutual friend and they would go to class or something and it’s like ‘oh shit I have to actually talk to this guy’. But yeah, then we slowly started to become friends. I think it was the first day of summer after Softmore year of high school. Nico and my friend were wrestling and I joined in and once that physical element got introduced, I think that’s really when we became buds, and we were just inseparable and spent the whole summer together.
And the band? When did that start?
Luke: We always jammed in high school, as Nico had a shed in his back yard that we would use. Then we both went to college; he went to New York and I went to Santa Barbara,and I didn’t have much music going on around me and missed it a lot, so we started talking and reminiscing on jamming and decided to re-visit it on a higher level.
Nico: Yeah, it took some time because we both had to graduate. I’m living in New York right now and he’s in LA, so it’s kind of a pain sometimes-
Luke: Yeah everything is still coming into it’s own but I think its really starting to elevate pretty good here...so that’s always nice.
How would you describe Nitefire's sound and who are your musical influences?
Luke: So, at least with ‘Up 2 U’, it’s hard to deny the influence of 80’s bands and artists that we’ve been listening to for a long time like Prince and Depeche Mode, but really growing up I listened to all sorts of different things… whether that be 90’s Hip Hop or Classic Rock, so I think as we write more and more, those other influences will come in. I think when we were writing 'Up 2 U' we were in a really synth phase.
Nico: I mean we worked on that song for like two years because of the long distance thing primarily.
Luke Yeah so we are really still developing our sound, how would you describe it Nico?
Nico: It’s really hard to say now because we have one song out and all the other things we are working on seem very different...
Luke: I think at it’s core it’s pop music. We want people to dance and have fun with it, but also there’s obviously a bunch of elements that we want to incorporate from different genres and hopefully develop our own sound.
Nico: I think making pop music really allows you to be able to make the music you really want to make later on. Do you know what I mean? It seems that making pop music is a really approachable way of getting out there, as it gives you the opportunity to learn and just experiment with a nice platform to do what you want.
Talk to us about ‘Up 2 U’ and the music video for it.
Luke: So yeah, it was in the works for years-ever since we started talking about being in a band. It was one of the first songs we ever wrote, so in that way it’s a good indicator of the whole essence of the dawning of ‘Nitefire’. We started out just writing it in eachother's garages and then we brought it to a friend who helped us develop it a little bit more.
Nico: It’s seen so many studios across the country and been through so many different versions.
Luke: It’s been like a musical journey, just with that one song! Once we finally got it done, personally I felt we worked so hard on it that I wanted to release an a visual to accompany it.
Nico: So super last minute Luke had the idea to make a short VHS video, drive us out to Las Vegas, bring a couple of friends and make a weekend of it.
Luke: Also I think ‘Up 2 U’ is a great song to just have a simple video of us having fun and doing our thing, so I think it worked out.
Nico: Showing us… being buds, right?
Luke: Right.
What have you been listening to at the moment?
Luke: I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa recently, specifically the album ‘Apostrophe’. Also a lot of, what I guess is called, ‘City Pop’, which is just a lot of 80’s Japanese disco, been listening to a lot of that and sending a lot of that to Nico. I think we are both pretty into that at the moment.
Nico: I’ve been listening to Public Image LTD and weirdish post-punk. Also a load of Underworld for the last like 6 months, which I just can’t get enough of.
Luke: It’s good stuff.
What can you tell us about upcoming music?
Luke: We have a second single that we just recorded, and made a video for, which should be coming out early summer. The plan is to release a B-side with it, plus a video for one of the songs. And yeah, hoping everyone loves it…!
Nico: We’ve got a couple of demos that we are still tweaking out and I think this summer we will be releasing loads of music and doing a lot of shows around LA and New York. I’m moving back to LA for a little bit, so that’ll be great-
Luke: Yeah, hyper-mode time.
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