Night Tapes

Night Tapes: From South London Flat Walls to a Debut Worth the Wait

Night Tapes — the London dream pop trio of Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan, and Sam Richards — built one of independent music’s most quietly compelling catalogs from the floor up: literally, through the floorboards of a shared South London house.
Iiris Vesik (Estonia), Max Doohan (UK), and Sam Richards (UK) began jamming together as housemates in South London in the late 2010s, resulting in their first release Dream Forever in Glorious Stereo (2019).
Six years and four EPs later, their debut LP portals//polarities (2025) arrived as confirmation that slow-burning intention and cross-continental field recording can shape a debut album of genuine compositional weight.

Accidental Architecture: How the Trio Found Their Sound

The origin story of Night Tapes is less a strategic A&R play than a structural accident — and it’s inseparable from the band’s aesthetic.
Originally from Estonia, Vesik moved to London, where she met Max Doohan at university; after graduating, the two moved into a house with Sam “Richie” Richards, a childhood friend of Doohan’s.

Each of them were working on different musical projects in their own rooms: Doohan was playing in a band, Richards was making house music, and Vesik was dividing her time between her electronic solo project and a riot grrrl punk band.
The collision of those three sensibilities — post-punk rhythm, dance-floor architecture, and art-pop introspection — did not produce a compromise. It produced a new coordinate.

The sound of Night Tapes was born from the hiss and warmth of cassette recordings. “That’s why we called ourselves Night Tapes, because we were literally recording on cassettes at night,” Vesik explains.

When they eventually recorded their 2019 debut EP Dream Forever In Glorious Stereo, they did so at hushed volumes, so as not to disturb their neighbours.
That forced restraint — keeping the gain down, favoring reverb depth over dynamic attack — became a production signature. Multi-fidelity is not an accident here; it is an intentional decision to let analog imperfection do structural work.

As Max Doohan recalls, “The band really formed out of serendipity and it was the same for getting our music out there.” A friend who lived in the flat downstairs had just started an electronic music label called Breaker Breaker, and when Doohan played him the first EP, he wanted to put it out.

The band had always wanted their music on a physical format, and having a label working with them meant they could make cassette tapes and later, vinyl.
That domestic intimacy — the cassette machine, the neighbor who happened to run a label — set a precedent: Night Tapes’ music is shaped by proximity, both physical and emotional.

Night Tapes — Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan and Sam “Richie” Richards — quietly grew a reputation for multi-textured compositions which split electronica’s various differences, blending ambient noise and found sounds with more orthodox club-ready beats.
What distinguishes their production approach from bedroom pop’s wider field is the degree of arrangement discipline imposed over ostensibly spontaneous textures.
Their process blends traditional instruments with laptop production, drawing from synth-pop, shoegaze, trip-hop, and ambient music.
The reverb trails are long but never arbitrary; the sidechain compression on the low-end elements creates a pulse that anchors rather than numbs.

Four EPs and a Debut: The Arc of a Catalog Built on Patience

The band’s early catalog — Dream Forever In Glorious Stereo (2019), Download Spirit (2020), Perfect Kindness (2023), and assisted memories (2024) — reads less like a progression of discrete projects and more like successive refinements of a single, consistent impulse: the desire to capture feeling without over-explaining it. Dream Forever In Glorious Stereo established the aesthetic grammar: layered synths with slow attack envelopes, guitar lines treated with deep plate reverb, and Vesik’s vocal register sitting unusually low in the mix, integrated with the texture rather than placed above it.

The 2020 EP Download Spirit helped the band secure a deal with the Nettwerk label. Their follow-up EP, 2023’s Perfect Kindness, helped elevate Night Tapes’ profile ahead of their next single, “Drifting.”
That signing to Nettwerk — a label whose catalog includes Sarah McLachlan, Passenger, and Ásgeir — was significant: it placed Night Tapes in a company whose A&R history favors introspective, atmospherically rich artists with long catalog runway rather than short-cycle viral bets. Perfect Kindness in particular showed the band allowing themselves more structural complexity in arrangement — track “Inigo” reportedly went through twenty revisions before its final form, a level of editorial rigor that rarely surfaces in bedroom pop production.

The 2024 EP assisted memories comprised seven tracks: “drifting,” “loner,” “easy time to be alive,” “projections,” “assisted memories,” “waterfall,” and “every day is a game.”
“drifting” — the lead single — functioned as the clearest articulation of Richards’ production instincts to date: a piano figure with deliberately smeared harmonic edges, a trip-hop drum pattern with 1970s tape-saturation character applied in post, and Vesik’s vocal melody occupying the same frequency band as the pad layer so that the two blur at phrase boundaries rather than compete.
Richards has described the track as arriving quickly — pretty much the entire instrumental happened in a couple of hours — recorded in a tiny alcove squeezed in next to the stairs, with just enough room for a laptop and two speakers.

Their debut album portals//polarities (2025) — released September 26, 2025 on Nettwerk — represents the fullest expansion of every tendency in the preceding catalog.
The album’s opening track “enter” makes the band’s intention clear: blown-out distortion, a tape machine clicking, a blackbird call as if to announce you’ve crossed over a threshold. From there, the record slips through gauzy textures, wistful melodies, and electronics wrapped in haze, all stitched with field samples that tether it to reality: a swamp in Tallinn, birdsong in Mexico, a helicopter over Los Angeles, even the muffled quiet of a Southeast London flat.
The geographic breadth of those recordings is not set-dressing — it is the formal logic of the record.