Since forming in London, Ontario, in the early 2010s, producers Andrew Fedyk and Joe Depace—aka Loud Luxury—have been content to drop a handful of singles per year, retrofitting classic house vibes and modern R&B hooks for the festival dance tent on songs like “Body” and “Love No More.” But that steady stream of one-off releases belies the more conceptual vision the duo has been honing behind the scenes in their home away from home, Los Angeles. Their debut EP, Nights Like This, is no random sampling of tracks, but a carefully curated dance-pop set plotted along a discernible emotional arc. As Fedyk tellls Apple Music, “There's something universal about that idea of taking sad songs and making them dance-floor-ready. That’s the why EP is called Nights Like This—it can be the soundtrack to anyone’s night, whatever it is.” Here, Fedyk and Depace plot their track-by-track journey to the break of dawn.
Aftertaste (feat. Morgan St. Jean) Joe Depace: “We did a songwriter's speed-dating kind of camp one day. It was at a time when Andrew and I were grinding here and were really broke, so we were taking every opportunity. We got to meet a lot of new writers, like this girl named Morgan from LA.” Andrew Fedyk: “She was a USC student at the time, but she had the most incredible voice—she had this crazy Florence + the Machine vibe to her. And she wrote this song, which was a slower ballad. We were just coming back from Jamaica when we got it, and we were on this energy of wanting to make something really fun and rhythmic and fast, so we took her song and sped it up and did all this crazy stuff to it.” JD: “We made this before 'Body,' and we didn't really know what was going on with our career. We were ready to pack things up every day, because we didn't know how things were going to go. So this is a really cool one for us, because it's something that we made during the time we were really trying to find our sound.”
Gummy (feat. brando) AF: “This was actually the first song we wrote after 'Body' was released [in 2017]. We've been sitting on this for a very long time. It just felt more special to wait and come back to that sound, and make people miss it.” JD: “brando started off singing the chorus as ‘stretch it out like a Gumby’—like the cartoon character. And we were like, ‘Yo, let's change it to gummy, because it still works’—it could be a gummy bear or anything really sticky and elastic. So we just ran with that concept of being versatile and finessing any situation that you need to.”
Nights Like This (feat. CID) JD: “We've known [New York DJ] CID for a very, very long time. When we started our bus tour last fall, we were looking at people who could come perform with us and thought CID would be perfect. We worked on the majority of this song while we were on the bus, because we wanted something that we could play together.” AF: “CID has a more clubby sound. So for us, it was cool to just make something that felt very repetitive and can go off in the club without getting too deep into lyrics and songwriting. And then we decided to do that more atmospheric intro, where it's just the vocal—kind of like The 1975. That was something different for us that was really exciting.”
Cold Feet JD: “We've had the fortune of growing into our sound—when you hear a song of ours, you can say, 'Oh, that's a Loud Luxury song.' But we wanted to make something that was a little different and more emotional than some of the other stuff that we've been doing. This track is a really good example of that, because we have the pianos and a really unique vocal from [LA singer] Royal & the Serpent.” AF: “This song started off with just lyrics over a stripped-down piano. So then we took it and created a new world for it. It all started when we got introduced to some friends from Nashville, so this was like our first real dabble into the Nashville world of writing. People in LA wouldn’t write lyrics like this, so it was really interesting to take that and try to find a way to make it Loud Luxury.”