The Paper Kites Wanna Force You To Listen

All material for The Paper Kites' latest album, twelvefour, was written between midnight and 4am across a two-month period, and keyboardist/vocalist Sam Bentley admits, "I'm still like kinda hung up on the night time. I dunno, the day's kind of lost its appeal a little bit at the moment; I'm finding, like, just the time that I sit down and listen to music always seems to be after hours."

When "staying up at that time of night", Bentley believes "you often feel very melancholy": "You wanna listen to something that moves you and that kind of makes you feel a certain way... I would love to be the band that people put on when they kind of feel that way [laughs]."  

"It's supposed to feel like, I dunno, a Greenwich Village-style apartment building just with a couple of windows placed behind the band."

The Paper Kites are in the final planning stages for their upcoming Midnight tour at the time of our chat and Bentley describes the concept, which calls to mind Hitchcock's Rear Window. "The idea is that it's supposed to feel like, I dunno, a Greenwich Village-style apartment building just with a couple of windows placed behind the band; it's sort of like a theatre production, but with a live band kind of playing the soundtrack in front of you. There's a bunch of stories that happen through these windows so the audience is watching into someone's window from across the street."

Although The Paper Kites initially wanted to incorporate actors ("I thought that would be really cool, but the cost of touring that sort of production..."), Bentley points out the advantages of using pre-recorded footage: "There's a lot more flexibility as well in projecting onto the window... The idea is that you're really watching these events unfold in real time in the space of an evening."

In order to create a "midnight experience" for their audiences, Bentley reveals, "We're even experimenting with having moments in the show where all the lights go out and, like, it's completely pitch black. And we're trying to rehearse songs to play in the darkness just to kind of force people to really listen and kinda take the visual element out of it."

The band embarked on their first European tour earlier this year, which included sold out shows in Poland ("we had no idea that we had fans in Poland!") and Amsterdam. "The Amsterdam shows sold out really quickly, surprisingly," Bentley enthuses, "and they said, 'Oh, we're gonna move you to a bigger venue.' They put us in a place called the Paradiso... And that was a sold out show as well. That was, like, 1,500 people or something like that and that was going from playing, you know, 300-or-so [capacity] clubs everywhere else. But Amsterdam just took off for some reason, so that was really weird."

When asked whether he's managed to fit in any songwriting sessions since the release of their last album, Bentley confesses, "Honestly, I haven't written a thing since I finished the twelvefour sessions just 'cause I'm not really the sort of writer that is always writing. I dunno, I feel like I kind of need to reassess what it is I wanna say, and how I wanna say it... I feel like I really love to draw inspiration from different places, like, you know, I love film and how music is very often connected with a lot of visual elements and things like that."