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Photo: Angus Steele

To recompense talent and creativity, great burdens are imagined by lay folk: restless nights haunted by dreams, emotional seesaws as one wrestles with feelings only the best human antenna can register, and so forth. But oftentimes, the truth of that construct is just locking yourself in a hot windowless room with your musical foil and putting great effort into your craft. Less magical in its inception, more in its output. What does that make Sad Night Dynamite? Well, for starters, a group feverish in its intensity and amongst an elect few groups that we would deem a must-listen.

Sad Night Dynamite is the product of a friendship between Archie and Josh, festooned with adventures outside of Glastonbury, England. The dynamic and dichotomous nature of their sound parallels their friendship, a wash of influences from film and music that culminate in one brain with two distinctive egos. Raised in the shadow of hip-hop, electronica and legacy bands like The Specials, Archie and Josh are no strangers to the deep diving, crate digging nature of the vinyl era of music. Their sound—fearless, collaborative, and fresh—and their innate desire to “nerd out on music” reflects just that. Equally, they compile visuals rife with references to pop cinema, often dark and poetic, but with a current of concise humor that is built into many of their narratives.

"What Does That Make Me?" is a plight of optimism and happiness not immediately evident in such of Sad Night Dynamite’s catalog, and the video accompaniment expands upon that theme in bright, saturated colors. Much of the visualizer still has the bizarre, dreamlike quality (picnic adjacent voodoo doll, sinking ship effects at the local pub, nuns playing soccer midfield) congruent to many of their visual efforts but the tone is a more adventurous, bright journey. Under the bright sun, the boys are open to adventure, looking for a cell signal, lining up with luggage and serenading each other in a rowboat on an idyllic pond. Fond of juxtaposition, contrasting light and dark, the boys admit that “this is the light” part of their creative yield. Strangely, or maybe intuitively to them, the song is about feeling “prangy,” anxious and ill at ease. How that manifests in such a beautiful video is hard to reckon, but the effort is immersive. 

Great artists are always world creators, arbiters of a lens that can bring beauty into immaculate focus one moment and then quickly distort, or as they put it, “taking everything that's happening with the world and adding mud.” Sad Night Dynamite inhabits a world where even the most surreal and fiendish of us get uncomfortable, but we aren’t interlopers, we are coconspirators in making music without compromise. What does that make us? So much the better for it. 

Watch the "What Does That Make Me?" video below: