NIGHT FLIGHT

There’s a nocturnal compulsion to Exit Stage Left, the new release from Sam Holmes and Harry Phillips’s indie folk band-turned-duo Night Flight. Ethereal, nostalgic, and melancholic, too, the album hovers in the liminal spaces between happy and sad, memory and presence, the songs’ storied origins and the ear of the listener, in this moment, here and now. With characteristically understated lyricism, Sam and Harry invite us in: “Come take my hand” goes the opening line. And as ‘Cold to the Touch’ opens around us, we enter a record that emerges over the course of its 41 minutes as a hybrid creature: part-painting, part-flashback, part-confession, part-beginning, part-goodbye. Given the uncertainty of the past few years, a degree of hybridity makes sense. From its origins to now, this record has witnessed the ending of an engagement, the birth of a second child, the chaos of an entire country in the wake of the global pandemic, and a change in the foundations of Night Flight itself. - Lily Freeah Leoma Taylor