1.
Three people are sitting around a wooden kitchen table in Park Slope eating dinner. There’s little at all to indicate that they’re one of the hottest-tipped electronic pop acts of 2013 aside from the fact that the living room is littered with studio quality recording equipment. On the cusp of their debut EP Tunnel Vision, Little Daylight are perfectly poised for their break into mainstream musical notoriety—except no one knows who they are.
Plenty of people have heard the group’s songs, but beyond the names Nikki, Matt and Eric, it’s difficult to find out much more about the personalities behind the music. Ageless and anonymous, the trio aren’t part of Brooklyn’s ramshackle Williamsburg/Bushwick DIY scene, instead a sprawling wood-paneled home in a remote family-centric neighborhood serves as the recording studio and headquarters for the trio.
"We wanted everything in the press to be about Little Daylight as long as possible," explains Matt, the group’s guitarist. "We wanted it to about the music, about the band and about the show." In a celebrity-driven culture that incessantly focuses on a cult of personality the desire for anonymity is a strange route. But it’s one that more and more acts seem to be opting for.
Back in 2012, Little Daylight emerged as remixers, adding their own electronic flourishes and airy injections to songs like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zero’s "Man on Fire" or Freelance Whale’s "Spitting Image." Leaving New York altogether last fall to shut themselves up in a lake house and fully realize the group’s vision, they began to record original material.
The first taste of this effort came last January with the release of "Overdose," a click-happy, heady pop track that skyrocketed to the top spot on internet tastemaking tracker Hype Machine and stayed there. Off this popularity spike, the group booked several live shows at SXSW and began to record and perform in earnest. Following this initial single, a steady stream of crackling bubblegum songs continued to flow—tracks that somehow sidestep previous conceptions of pop. There’s an addictive, spine-tingling quality to the songs, complete with the weight of enormous radio hit, but none of the dramatic star personality behind them. Devoid of any human story, the songs scan as perfect in their conceptuality, pop with the music actually at its center.
Underneath everything that we do, underneath pop music, and underneath things that people really like to listen to is kind of the same quintessential stuff—it feels good and it sounds good. I’m interested in why things are like that. What it is that compels me to listen to something a million times?
"I think we’re all comfortable with pop," said lead vocalist Nikki of the group’s sound. “Underneath everything that we do, underneath pop music, and underneath things that people really like to listen to is kind of the same quintessential stuff—it feels good and it sounds good.
"I’m interested in why things are like that. What it is that compels me to listen to something a million times? And maybe it’s not even pop music itself, but that essence is what I like to have underpinning our music."
2.
Pop has often been equated to the "it" quality assigned to songs that worm their way into our ears. But even though these songs are addictive, accessible and electronic, it’s hard to place the compositions in a traditional saccharine classification because the collective skips the cult of personality that tends to accompany current mainstream pop.
Electronic dance music and its many offshoots have reached a pivotal height in 2013, bringing sounds that have populated underground clubs and generic-specific categories into the forefront of the scene—and in many ways the trio are playing off these sonic touchstones. But the rise of electronic music has also allowed for masked and unknown artists to populate a massive new market from the comfort of their own bedrooms. Most electronic music can be made alone, or without much outside help, and Little Daylight’s music is solely the work of the three members.
For us it was the choice to quiet all of the other chatter and focus on ourselves and on the music—to give it time.
"We’ve never really thought of it any other way," Eric, the group’s bassist explained. "It’s not like we started by making the conscious decision to limit our involvement with other people. It was just happening that way and we were happy. So there never was any reason to change our process."
In a lot of ways, this type of dance-driven, synth-heavy pop music functions better in a recorded setting as opposed to a live performance, but Little Daylight manage to make their live show crackle. The live bass and guitar help balance out the synth and vocoder elements, which can be somewhat monotonous to watch live. At a recent performance at the Full Moon Festival in New York, the group drew a larger crowd to their set on the smaller, side stage than the act performing on the main stage. Leveraging this tumultuous mixture of traditional pop and electronic-infused is clearly working for the trio.
To write and record Tunnel Vision, out today (8/13), the group opted out of a traditional studio and instead rented a spacious vacation home in the hillside Brooklyn suburb of Park Slope. All three are from the New York area, but they needed their own shared space to work and create. And they chose to do so far removed from the trenches of Williamsburg and Bushwick, where most of New York’s aspiring music scene holes up. Perhaps it’s this physical separation that’s helped the group maintain sonic distance.
"It’s about being personal, it’s hard enough for the three of us to figure out what we all mean to say together," says Matt of their recording location. "We’re very blessed in that we’re close friends but we’re still putting stuff together and any creative process is a struggle. For us it was the choice to quiet all of the other chatter and focus on ourselves and on the music—to give it time."
3.
This careful, studied decision-making can be heard everywhere in the music Little Daylight makes, but their friendship isn’t visible. Like the rest of their personal lives, it’s excluded from the mix. Some bands fall into their major label deals, insta-fame and musical choices—this band dictates theirs with precision and planning. The EP is just another step on this carefully manicured path that leads toward a full-length record.
"Right now we’re going through 40+ kernels of ideas that we’ve collected and iTunes playlists," Eric, the bassist said. "We're spending a minimal amount of time on each, maybe two days, and then moving on—being very strict about this process. Then at the end of the summer, we’ll then reflect on everything we’ve done and at that point we’ll piece together our favorites and start thinking about it as an album."
How does all this planning and structure come through in the music? Like a dream. The songs are air-tight, heavy-hitting pop gems. Flickers of autotuned vocals cast shadows against a synth-laden backdrops, the words swell and rise in choral arrangements that mimic the galloping drums and vocoder lines. The subject matter wanders through the tensions of new relationships, as on "Restart," other songs touch on the tantalizing pull of fame, and all-instrumental track "Treelines” hints at a more introspective, melancholy side.
"We wanted there to be tracks that aren’t necessarily aimed at trying to be summer jams that people are playing at parties," Matt said. "We want the stuff in between that’s exciting and interesting. To have peaks, you have to have valleys. You just have to relax and get excited and relax and get excited. That’s life."
I think the goal has to be that you make music that you’re into and that you think is great.
In the multivariate realm of pop music, the trio have clear goals and a perspective that genuinely seems aimed at creating the best product possible. Their calculated process may seem a bit intensive, but it’s led them to success in a field that’s notoriously difficult to crack. How else do they define success? By making art that they themselves enjoy.
"To me, I think the goal has to be that you make music that you’re into and that you think is great," Nikki said. "As long as that goal is met then I feel like other things will sort of naturally go forward from that. At least I’ll be happy if I’m really into what we’re doing."
Buy their debut EP Tunnel Vision here.
