FAULT Magazine chat music with upcoming trio – ‘MDNGHT’

Manchester disco house collective MDNGHT has some very exciting news and they’ve exclusively shared it with FAULT!

J (vocals), Ant (guitar) and Will (guitar) are releasing EP “Into The Night” which is out on September 25th this year, and they’ve just introduced a new video on a single of the same name.

Hi guys! Congratulations on your “Into The Night” new video and the upcoming EP (Into The Night EP out on September 25th). Amazing summer vibes! How did you come up with the idea for the video and who produced it? 

Thank you, so glad you like the track and the video. The concept behind the video came from the director, Edward John Drake. We were sold on the idea straight away. The story is basically a petty thief on the streets of LA who gets released from prison and is struggling to turn his life around and start a new one with his girlfriend. It kinda gives an alternative meaning to the lyrics with the “everything I believe… for you I’d leave it all”, which we think is really cool. The twist at the end of the video makes it for us, but we won’t spoil it for your readers (laughs).

We know your debut record is to be released in early 2016. What can we expect from this album?

On the album we’ve tried to represent all the different elements of our sound, so you can certainly expect to hear parts of our sound that maybe we haven’t had chance to showcase yet. We have a massively diverse range of influences, so we wanted to get them all across.

What’s your plan once the record drops? Do you plan any gigs in 2016?

Absolutely! the plan is to tour as much as possible, and play as many festivals as possible. We want to conquer the UK first of course, but we already have fans from America and Mainland Europe asking us to come play their cities, so I guess it’d be rude not to, hey?

Can you tell us more about MDNGHT? How did you guys meet each other and how did it all get started? 

The three of us have been friends for years. In fact, Ant and Will have been friends since they were 5! We’ve all individually played music, dabbled in song writing and production from being teenagers, so we just kind of naturally came together a few years ago and started making music together. Musically, we hit it off straight away and we haven’t looked back since.

What’s the idea behind your name? 

I think we just started off throwing words about that we thought were relevant to our sound. The word midnight stuck out to us. Just the images and thoughts it conjurs tied in really well with how we were hearing our music.

After a lot of digging, our manager found a band from the 70’s who already had the name (we knew it was too good to be true), so we were faced with the decision; think up a whole new name, or drop the vowels.

How would you describe the music you make?

It’s a mix of elements of House, Disco, Soul, and R&B. If you can imagine The Weeknd, Nile Rodgers, and Hot Natured getting together in the studio & making a track, it’d probably sound a bit like a rip off of us (laughs). Joking of course.

What’s your inspiration and music influences?

We take inspiration from so much. Right now we’re taking a lot of inspiration from old Michael Jackson material. Off The Wall is one of our favourite albums. The production, the guitars, the vocals; I guess that’s the level we strive to be at. You really can’t knock any element of it. It still sounds so fresh today, and it’s 36 years old! Imagine how exciting that sounded in 1979. We’ll let you in a little secret actually… we’re currently working on our own cover of one of the best tracks from that album. We’ll let you guess which.

We get inspired by loads of other stuff too though, we love modern music too. We’ve been fans of The Weeknd from back when he was releasing free mix tapes, we love producers like Jamie XX, Claude Vonstroke, Sohn etc. Also loving the sound of Jamie Woon right now, but I’d say that’s more a case of us sharing some of the same influences as opposed to being an influence.

To be totally honest, at this point what inspires us most to make music is classic disco, soul, motown etc. The quality of the songwriting back then was; and we hate to say it; so much higher than what’s about today. That’s the ultimate goal with our music. To be write songs that good.

You were praised by BBC, The Guardian and many other media. How do you feel about it? What challenges did you face before getting the recognition?

Yeh so many great, well respected websites, magazines, blogs & radio stations have given us positive feedback and got behind us. It’s amazing to know that the people & organisations who’s views and taste you trust, love what you’re doing. I think one of the highlights was last year, when we got invited to play Radio 1’s Big Weekend last year off the back of the BBC supporting our music on Radio 1. We thought “ok, well we must be doing something right” (laughs). No but seriously, it was an amazing feeling. It took us several days to accept that it’d really happened. 

The challenge? Getting their attention in the first place. There’s so much great music out there these days.

What’s your fault? 

Procrastination. We’re terrible for it. We pretty much work in intervals of 30 mins productivity, 30 mins messing about. We’re like kids really… apart from we’re adults so we can mess about as much as we want & do what we want, & eat sweets before our dinner if we want to, and… wait, this is the problem. We better get back to rehearsing. Thanks for having us.

Words: Ksenia Safrey