Nightbus – Passenger: Album Review

Live4ever 14 October, 2025

Artwork for the Nightbus album Passenger

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Over time, Nightbus’ sound has been honed into something far more crepuscular than the leftfield pop shape of 2024’s ‘Average Boy’.

There’s something very different about life in the night.

Temporarily, us normies can glimpse it in the rare moments when we either stay up late or go out early, but that’s not the real after dark, the place where things happen just out of vision and the blurry trace of phone cameras catches only twisted pictures and less shame.

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Mancunians Nightbus – now just Olive Rees and Jake Cottier after the departure of Zac Melrose – seem to enjoy this hinterland – and making music that is comfortable in it – a sound which Melrose once dubbed, ‘Electronic post-punk goth chic’.

Passenger is their first album after a string of fascinating singles. Comparisons to The XX seem inevitable, but over time their sound has been honed into something far more crepuscular than the leftfield pop shape of 2024’s Average Boy.

In a duo the doing roles can sometimes blur, but Rees’ dreamy, reverb-laden voice joins seamlessly to Cottier’s multi-instrumentation and sampling, a clear delineation that has the former serving as an intoxicant for the latter.

Once this drink has been taken things become indistinct and out of focus almost straight away.

The instrumental opener Somewhere Nowhere fuses the percussive dubstep shuffle of Burial with The Cure’s early gothic monochrome, its discombobulated voices echoing from an overheard plea.

Nobody’s here for weird transport themed side references probably, but the title of Angles Mortz – a sticky amalgam of post punk and chilly synths with lyrics like, ‘I’m a whore/I’m a Sadist/Mi amore/It so tasteless’ – refers to the dangers blind spots on buses pose to other suckers between sundown and sunup. So, there you go.

More seriously, Nightbus is a respite for the pair from working dead end jobs, worrying about where the rent is coming from and existentially the fate of an increasingly ailing planet.

When being in a band as well as what it produces offers a personal salvation, the consequences can be very messy.

On Landslide, the other side of the looking glass becomes indeterminable from the truth, a set of cumulative effects Rose describes with: “I have never pursued something more addictive in my life but sometimes the emotional and physical toll is high. How long do you keep chasing a dream, before the dream becomes a nightmare? A nightmare that’s a fantasy, legacy and reality.”

Sometimes however, the urges are too strong to fight. On Ascension, over a glistery shoegaze backdrop, the singer contemplates what it might be like to run from it all, an escape with an end game she says to, ‘Meet you home in a higher life’, the twilight taking hold again.

This is the place Nightbus inhabit here, one they know is filled with, ‘secrets, fantasies, shame and fears, lost in the underworld of humanity, a dreamscape of tabu existence, things that define us but wouldn’t come up in casual conversations…this album is that traveller, the passenger’.

There’s a lot of introspection in play here – and the duo favour Nightbus as a choose your own adventure concept, one where you end up with pleasures or punishments entirely of your own design.

To help the journey they offer False Prophet, its glacially deep synth pop like Goldfrapp woken up after a thousand years of cryogenic stasis, whilst the epic Host’s strung-out trip-hop is the prelude to a messy cellular breakdown that feels inevitable from the first note.

There is something very different about the night. It forgives things you can’t forget, the world Nightbus inhabit alongside their lives.

You don’t need a ticket for Passengers, but you’ll want to get on board.

Andy Peterson

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Tags:andy peterson, Nightbus