It’s been a couple of months since Paris based LAST NIGHT released their third LP “Negative 384 400”, but it’s never too late to appreciate its absorbing, attitude-driven signature sound. To do so, we sat down with the band to serve us a proper dose of insights and details behind their work, full track by track rundown and special commentary about their local scene.
Over the past 20 years, members of LAST NIGHT have distinguished themselves in a good number of groups, and have asserted themselves to the breasts of different aesthetics. Evolving somewhere between The Fall and Minor Threat, “Negative 384 400” is a collective outcome of a group that learned how to look further and push limits while remaining faithful to the very soul of the project. A clear, obscure, pessimistic and humanist album, orchestrated within a clash of rhythms and noises that find the group taking well measured and varied approach.
The record is out now via the band’s own Viro Major Records.
We’ve been around since 2012, we’ve released 3LP and a tape. We know each other for a long time because we’ve been involved in the punk rock scene for more than 20 years, we played in bands like Jetsex, Fix it, les Cavaliers, M-Sixteen, Betty for clinic and many more. Some of us are also playing in bands like Frustration or TV Violence.
The line up has been a 3 pieces, a 4 pieces, a 5 pieces and then a 4 pieces again, we stopped on playing with a synth on stage for beeing back to a classic rock line up.
We are really into a lot of different kind of music in general, I guess our background is far to be only punk, or hardcore.
« Negative 384 400 » is a pure DIY product, for the first time everyone wrotte songs, and we don’t try to fit into any kind of sub genre. I guess we just followed our experience and desires, we were into 77 punk rock on the early days, then went to something between garage and post punk. I guess our hardcore punk background went back on that one and we’ve chose to listen to ourselves.
We did the recording by ourselves as well, wich was really nice.
Track-by-track commentary
People’s Lies
The first song of new album, also the first we wrote. The lyrics talk about the ability to visualize how regular people will end up in the future. And also how they end up not doing what they are supposed to do.
Color Blind
When i wrote those lyrics, i wanted to sing idiomatic words and colors, the idea is , is the color or the associated words more important? What a color blind person would think ?
Watch Him Die
Who’s never wanted to kill his boss? Some dude in USA have done that in the 80’s
Mazes
A theme that comes up often in my lyrics, escaping a place, escaping this world, it used to be much more negative than in this song, where i kind of suceed at the end.
Opposition
This is a song about 2 worlds confronting each other. People with money, middle class people, and migrants, this idea came to me in the suburds. There some aerial suburds parts in Paris, where you see a lot of tents of migrants, the next day there’s gone…
Fragile
A song about boxing and fighting, i lost more fights than i ve won
You First
A war song, the idea i have of the vision of a soldier against his enemy on the battlefield
Last Fight
The last one of the record, only two sentences repeated till the end of the song, it’s the feeling i have about music, life and everything.
Plans for 2020
We are working on a new EP, about the gigs the situation seems quite hard for the moment, lot of shows has been deleted.
French hardcore / post hardcore scene
About the French scene, we’re lucky that it’s still prolific, with a lot of bands with different styles. But a lot of lives venues and bar are beeing shutting down one by one, so we are living the hard days. My main regrets about the scene, we become more and more separated, I mean, aside from the comradeship the concert are way to homogenous.
Punk scene in France is suffering from a lack of curiosity, that’s just my humble point of view.
