The Nightmares: Drawing Inspiration From The Supernatural

Most of the time when an artist is asked about what inspires them when writing songs, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll receive answers ranging from love and relationships to personal struggles to life experiences, along with details about other musicians that shaped their sound. For THE NIGHTMARES and their debut album Séance, while some songs may fall into those categories, it goes deeper than that with their shared interest of the macabre, horror-inspired media and even conducting some at home seances.

At first that description might sound rather intense but, when breaking it down, a lot of the films and TV shows they refer are things that many of us would have watched growing up. When sitting down with members, bassist Benjamin Mainwaring and vocalist/guitarist Adam Parslow, they helped to explain where their interests came from, as Benjamin explains. “We all have a collective interest in the macabre, as a lot of alternative people do, things like horror films and that kind of art, and there’s also the bands that we grew up with. But you can even trace it back to The Addams Family and Beetlejuice from when we were kids, that’s the early things that start you down that path I think, consciously or subconsciously it does bleed into the songwriting. I’m sure there were other influences too like Rocky Horror Show and stuff like that.”

Yet when it comes to the songs and lyrics from THE NIGHTMARES, it all comes down to personal experience even when expressed through darker imagery as seen in their music videos. As Adam puts it, “that’s something that the four of us all share an interest in both darker parts of art and stuff that we grew up with. So those themes of mourning and love loss really come down to life experience and things that we’ve all gone through as individuals and even as a group of friends. We try to put it all out there when we’re writing, and the lyrics are something that we all talk about to make sure that we’re all happy with every line. I’d say it’s a real collective effort to bring those things across.”

One of the main things that allows THE NIGHTMARES to stand out within the music scene is their fusion of genres between noir-pop, retro-goth, and post-punk, resulting in something that not only sounds incredible but helps to depict a haunting atmosphere that you won’t easily forget. With such a wide range of genres, one must wonder where it all comes from. When asked, Adam says, “artists that influenced our kind of sound are a broad mixture. Key influences though, an obvious one would be THE CURE, which is a huge one for us, but then on the other side of things we have bands like ALKALINE TRIO and BLINK-182. PLACEBO, BRIGHT EYES, M83, a really weird mixture of influences that go into the pot when we’re writing songs.”

Benjamin agrees with this. “It’s like a melting pot of different things. I’m not saying we invented a wheel or anything, but I definitely think there’s a different spin on what we do compared to other post-punk bands because I do think we have more of an emo, early 2000s vibe in the music. So, it’s a little bit of 80s, shoe-gazey, post-punk world but we also put in 2000s emo, pop-punk world as well. I’d say we’re slightly on the outside of each scene, we’re like an amalgamation of those worlds is how I’d describe it.”

As previously mentioned, THE NIGHTMARES took inspiration from an interesting scenario. Thinking back to lockdown, when stuck at home a lot of us tried out new hobbies and skills to pass the time, so why shouldn’t those activities include conducting a séance at home? Curious by the supernatural, Adam and fellow member Eleanor Coburn (who are married) decided to try it out for themselves and what they experienced helped to shape the record. “Me and Ellie were at home during lockdown, we were interested in that world and it’s something neither of us had done beforehand. I guess just the isolation in lockdown and having nothing else to do we thought, ‘I wonder if we can learn how to do these things and try to do one ourselves?’ We just set up the living room, set up a table in the middle of the room and started experimenting in that world. It was pretty profound the stuff that happened from messing around with that, and it had a pretty big influence on the record where we shared our experiences with Ben and James.”

What they felt as they conducted the séance is “hard to describe” according to Adam but noted the shift of energy and weight in the room. It went on to help inspire the synopsis for the music video of From Above where it features a more ‘embellished’ rendition of the events that took place. Yet despite the creative outcome, they’re not in a rush to do it again.

Benjamin adds his thoughts on what happened. “The way Adam and Ellie described it afterwards sounded like it was quite a tangible experience that they went through. They did stop doing it after that, you could argue about whether it was a coincidence and whether it was the ‘cabin fever’ side of it where we all probably started thinking strange things during lockdown. It certainly seemed the impact the two of them had from the conversations that took place had a profound effect as it bled into the writing on album, especially on some songs.”

Séance is out now via Venn Records/Equal Vision Records.

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