Debut albums introduce a band and they can be tricky beasts. The sound, attitude and mood all tie in to create an image but there can be an urge to throw the kitchen sink into the mix given an unwieldy freedom. Thankfully Passenger, the first full-length from Manchester-via-Stockport duo Nightbus, is a thematic but sprawling, shadow-drenched statement that hums with an eerie beauty and desire. It flirts with darkness but throws itself headlong into its undertow. Despite the grit and gloom though there are glimmers of hope that manage to seep through, like neon bleeding into night.
Nightbus are made up of vocalist/lyricist Olive Rees and producer-percussionist Jake Cottier and their songs live in liminal spaces, the flicker between city nights and afterparty dawns. There’s a anaesthetised numbness and ecstasy ant the heart of Passenger, a collapse and transcendence. The XX-cum-Portishead-cum-post rave aura explores these thresholds and thrives in them. The album plays like a haunted ride through late-night streets, equal parts trip-hop dreamscape, industrial alleyway, and subterranean rave.
From the start, Nightbus situate themselves as storytellers of fractured selves. Rees writes in voices that are both hers and not hers: alter-egos, projections, severed parts of identity that act out hidden fears and forbidden impulses. In this way, Passenger is less diary than theatre, with characters stumbling through co-dependency (“The Void”), shame and kink (“Angles Mortz”), and the narcotic pull of music itself (“Landslide”). The lyrics drip with cinematic tension, but it’s the sonic architecture that makes them hit so hard. Cottier’s production layers reverb-heavy guitars, dread-soaked bass, and clattering beats into something entrancing with brutal edges
“Host,” a six-minute centrepiece that shapeshifts from whispered unease into a thunderous dub explosion, as if the track itself is possessed. Or “Ascension,” the pulsating lead single, which marries the synthetic gloss of NYC club beats with a sense of existential freefall. The swing from euphoria to devastated is palpable. Even the band’s earlier single “Mirrors,” with its sly nods to Mancunian post-punk forebears, feels refreshed here, its reflective melancholy sharpening into something sharper, stranger.
Recorded with producer Alex Greaves, Passenger is deliberately unpredictable. Sirens wail where you least expect them, tempos lurch without warning, songs stretch into improvised detours that leave you momentarily unmoored. It’s an album that resists easy categorisation, freely cherry picking from 90s trip-hop, indie sleaze, shoegaze, and electronica, but refusing to settle into any one of them. The result is a sound that feels at once familiar and uncanny, like a déjà vu you can’t quite place.
Part of Nightbus’s appeal lies in their refusal to turn away from discomfort. Where other bands might sand down the edges, Rees and Cottier lean in. They treat horror, both the cinematic kind and the personal demons, as a way of refracting lived experience until it becomes both universal and uncomfortably intimate. When Rees sings of disassociation, shame, or destruction, it’s not self-pity. They dare to face the things you’d rather ignore and as a result they discover that even the traces of light in the darkest corners.
Passenger ultimately feels like a world you enter, a bus route through a psychic city and by the time it ends, you don’t emerge altered, marked by the ride. They may not have all the answers to the question their title poses, what does it mean to be a passenger in your own life, but they capture the unease of living with that uncertainty. It’s a stylish debut, fully formed, and uncompromising. It’s music for the late-night wanderer, the over-thinker, the ecstatic and the broken.
7/10
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