Over before it even began: the dark electric pop duo Sad Night Dynamite
Perhaps it was the spectral surroundings to set their dark concoction ablaze, or maybe the Somerset duo are just a product of their generation’s pessimism, but sitting somewhere between dark atmospheric pop and garage hip-hop, the music of Sad Night Dynamite kicked up dust and showed potential to explode.
Archie Blagden and Josh Greacen met at school just outside of Glastonbury, seven years before the release of their first mixtape in 2020, at the tender age of 20, and barely a year later, they started producing with vocalists the likes of Moonchild Sanelly, IDK, and FKA twigs.
This is not the normal career progression of students passing heavy Logic files back and forth from their university dorms to the teammate who decided to study elsewhere, but who is still just as committed to keeping a very promising mission going; however, after years of after-school experimentation, the age of Covid finally witnessed the release of their first track, ‘Icy Violence’.
Its eerie story, straight out of a rap nightmare, became the blueprint for Sad Night Dynamite’s use of multiple elements to explore haunted soundscapes. The pandemic brought them to escalate into much darker places after reuniting back home from their shared East London flat, writing new material in an abandoned pub, with dead rats beneath the floorboards, charging their music with more fantasy and dystopia drama than before. Their ghostly backdrop kept them building, climaxing in some TikTok-powered expansion, with tracks like ‘Godfather’ and ‘Krunk’ going viral.
Although aided by the algorithm, the duo ought to be looked at through the lens of their musical prowess. Invoking themes of Satanism and self-exploration, these boys have range. Their deranged electric pop has a digital edge that brings a surreal sci-fi taste to its already metallic-heavy sonic landscape. Their music is so texturally rich that it really invokes the idea of two imaginative creatives getting crazy with their ideas, playing with some musical toys, and getting their friends to dance.
The highlight from their last album, Welcome to the Night, is undoubtedly ‘If You Walk’, and it definitely does not sound like something a new arrival to music just produced. Its solemn storytelling mixes with lustrous instrumentation reminiscent of Arabic funk, while each other track on the album has a unique flavour of its own.
The name of the record captures its ponderous element, since at the end of the day, its authors are really just trying to navigate their newly bloomed early-20s. Greacen told Clash that their work is “about us bumbling around in the dark, trying to make sense of everything. That’s what it is. There isn’t a huge concept. You’re listening to two people trying to take you on this confusing journey of introspection”.
Cut to two months after Welcome to the Night’s release in 2024, and their X account was emptied, their website deleted, their Instagram celebrating their ‘eulogy’, with the last post showing a white limousine that appeared on the cover of two out of their three album covers filmed crashing into a ditch, closing in sudden darkness with the words “SND 2020–2024”.
No explanation has really been given for the sudden silence, and from what we know, death isn’t one. The band had embarked on so high-strung a journey in so frantically short a time, it well could have been that they ran out of dynamite, or the night got too sad. Whatever the reason, they left a fanbase feeling starved of something they only just got to taste maturing.
