Night Beats, the Texas-born brainchild of Danny Lee Blackwell, are set to release ‘Outlaw R&B’ on East London’s Fuzz Club Records (7th May). We are promised a return to a raw, acid-fried sound which, as of today, culminates with Tickets, a white-knuckle dystopian skateboard ride through a late-night LA during the height of the California wildfires, rioting in the streets and a nation in lockdown.
Blackwell’s vision comes to fruition through the eye of Director Cameron Holland whose work on this video is stunning. It’s a gripping and edgy ride as we join Dayana Young gliding through the city’s underbelly to a fast-paced track that tackles police brutality and thinly-veiled corruption in the US. Blackwell says of the song: “Ticket was recorded in Los Angeles at the height of the riots and chaos in 2020. Police sirens, fireworks and gunshots became the soundtrack to everyday life in Hollywood. The main character of Ticket is another victim of a twisted f*ck with a badge. The first half of the song is from the perspective of the cops but then the lens shifts and eventually, the predator becomes the prey.”
On the ‘Ticket’ video, directed by Cameron Holland, Blackwell says: ”I wanted to capture the essence of Ticket in a way that explored the dystopian nature of Los Angeles in 2020. I love ‘film noir’ from the 50s and grew up on skate videos of the late 90s/early 2000s. I wanted to try and combine those two moulds in a ‘Skate Film Noir’ where our character is being chased by an implied danger. Dayana [Young] travels through the city of LA on her skateboard almost with childlike wonderment – to the backdrop of empty foggy streets, decaying urban life, police sirens and helicopters flying by. In the end, all we can do is keep going, and be as introspective as one can be in a burning house.”
“Outlaw R&B is music for the borderless, the free, the outcasts and the forgotten”, Blackwell says, outlining the incoming album’s mission statement: “Through this medium you escape the confines of mental feudalism and bask in the euphoric glow of psychedelic R&B. The outlaw is the runner. Those whose minds aren’t sold by perfect pitch and clean fingernails.”
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Photo Credit: Hamilton Boyce