De La Noche Announce New Album BLUE DAYS, BLACK NIGHTS

On August 23 De La Noche, featuring Ivan Howard of The Rosebuds, Gayngs, Howard Ivans, will release Blue Days, Black Nights via Get Loud (pre-order). This week the band shared the album's lead single with Brooklyn Vegan. Listen below! About the track, De La Noche's Robert Rogan says, "After the end of a long-term relationship, I found myself walking down the same downtown streets we used to walk together, but now I was walking them alone with no one to see and nowhere to go. I thought of a passage from a T.S. Eliot poem: "Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets/And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes/Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? .../I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." That's how I felt at the time, and that's how Avenues came to be."

Listen here:

After years on the road with indie darlings The Rosebuds, writing for Kanye West with Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), funking out in his alter ego Howard Ivans (Spacebomb Records) and helping found the supergroup GAYNGS, Ivan Howard ended up in his Portland home with an unusual patch of quiet in late 2018. But, as is the nature of quiet, it didn't last long.

Howard found himself reconnecting with long-time friends Robert Rogan and Brian Weeks. "We met my freshman year of college. Brian heard I could sing, and cornered me in a stairway 'til I sang Let Love Rule. We ended up in our first band together, and he helped me realize that life wasn't all basketball. I might be ok at music, too." Weeks introduced Howard to Rogan, and the three became close, with Weeks eventually joining The Rosebuds and Howard Ivans as a touring musician, in between stints in Wilmington indie bands with Rogan.

Fast forward a few years to 2018. Rogan and Weeks were working on a new project. "We recorded 11 songs with scratch vocal tracks, but neither Robert nor I were completely comfortable singing on them." They decided to send the tracks to Howard, who at this point had moved across the country to Portland, OR. They wanted to get his take on it. No one realized it would turn into a modern day Postal Service moment.

De La Noche's beginnings trace back to Robert Rogan and Brian Weeks' adopted hometown of Wilmington, NC. In the summer of 2015, Rogan found himself rudderless. "I was going through a divorce. I found that I had a lot of time on my hands with few distractions and started playing around." Dealing with the isolation that comes when things fall apart, he looked to his longtime friend, Weeks, to collaborate with on a new set of songs, ones that would feel closer to the 80s synth pop they'd grown up adoring than the guitar-driven indie rock bands they'd been playing in.

Howard, for his part, found it easy to slip into the De La Noche material. "I tried to let the music dictate the sentiment of each song and just created a character that could fill all these melodic parts." What comes out mixes the skulking grooves of Avalon-era Roxy Music with the soothing melodicism of Sade (Howard drawing influence from the British singer comes as no surprise, having covered Love Deluxe in its entirety with The Rosebuds).

Howard's emotional distance from the material allowed for a more adventurous approach to the vocal sketches, and his clean, clear voice soars over the instrumental thrum. The album is bookended by its two most pivotal songs. Opener "Avenues" fades in with soft piano and drifting sax melodies over heavy rain, before settling into a mid-tempo groove with Howard's hushed voice dancing around the dense soundscape.

The men of De La Noche know duende, and just as their name translates to Of The Night, so is their music the shadow one can only see because the light is just a little ways away.

Photo credit: Justin Mitchener & Taylor Bolding