Liquid Monk are a quartet of multi-talented multi-instrumentalists from Detroit who began life playing to the jam and electronic-music scenes of the Great Lakes State, but as they prepare to release their self-titled debut in a couple of weeks, it seems inevitable that their scope is about to change in a major way.
That’s owing in part to the group’s shift into a kind of sultry late-night dance music built around silky grooves and punctuated by the anachronistic skronk of analog synths that sound more at home in the spookified world of S U R V I V E than they do in “Nighttime,” whose video we’re premiering this morning.
In fact, “Nighttime” is made of a handful of seemingly disparate parts that don’t on the surface of things seem to have much in common: that analog synth, a thumping club beat, and a soft cabaret vocal from jazz singer Kameryn Ogden. Liquid Monk don’t so much blend these things as set them in orbit around one another, every part of the song pulsing on its own path. Its true joys come in the way they use negative space to fill the gaps between; who says you can’t make a drum machine swing?
Liquid Monks is out September 22 via Beverly Martel, but you can check out “Nighttime” below.
