Divus Julius presents: Nightlands

Nightlands is the recording project of Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist Dave Hartley. The music he creates in his bedroom is itself a bed of delicate, chiming strings and bubbling synths beneath a blanket of choral vocal arrangements. It’s dreamy in the literal sense — the seeds for the album were sown when Hartley began archiving musical ideas that occurred in his sleep with a simple bedside tape recorder. As a result his debut album Forget the Mantra is, in essence, a field recording of Hartley’s dreams — a travel journal through pop music and a collection of psych-hymns from the first human lunar colony. The songs sound both huge and intimate, breathy and cavernous like massive echoes of a faraway concert. It’s the big, shadow music from just across the lake.

The War On Drugs just put out a new album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore. Around the time they released their previous album in 2017, the band’s bassist Dave Hartley put out a new album of his own as Nightlands. Now, he’s back with another Nightlands project, an EP called Moonshine.

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