Artist: Allo Darlin’
Title: Bright Nights
Formats:
12” vinyl (ltd edition dusky nights colour vinyl
black vinyl edition
sunshine Rough Trade Exclusive yellow on transparent)
Digifile CD
Digital
Cat#: Fika107
Release date: 11th July 2025
Bandcamp | Spotify
Fika Recordings [UK] & Slumberland Records [USA]
On their first new material in a decade, Anglo-Australian indiepop quartet Allo Darlin’ return with their upcoming album 'Bright Nights' in July 2025 and marking the return of their smart, beautiful pop music, with lyrics that resonate with experience and melodies that chime, echo and soar.
Missing each other and the music they made together, Allo Darlin’ started having group Zoom calls during the early days of the corona pandemic, and decided that when the pandemic was over, they would become a band again. True to their word, in early 2023, the band announced that they would play a couple of shows in October of that year in the UK, and the fan response was truly overwhelming. Tickets sold out in minutes, with fans travelling from all over the world, and the band had to upgrade their London show to a venue twice the size of the original. It seemed like their fans had missed Allo Darlin’ as much as they had missed each other.
Bright Nights follows the emotional tides of the preceding ten years: “It’s an album from the heart, dealing with themes of love, birth and death, which are things we reflect more on than we did when we made our first album. I would hope that the album sounds timeless and joyous, at other times reflective and emotional” says songwriter and vocalist Elizabeth Morris Innset.
Drawing inspiration from a mix of classic pop, folk and country, Bright Nights picks up where Allo Darlin’ left off with the warmth of 2014’s We Come From The Same Place, and recalls the confident and sophisticated sound of their second album, Europe. “When I listen to it I think of the desert, but I can see the sea. The sweet sounds of summer’s bright nights in the Northern hemisphere, but an awareness that winter will one day return”.
The lilting first single ‘Tricky Questions’' exhibits Elizabeth's adept skill at taking specific experiences and creating something timeless and universally resonant, and recalls living in Florence. “The city was full of tourists during the day,” she recalls “but after 9pm, they would all go back to their hotels. That’s when the city came alive to me, and it felt like it was just for us.”
This sense of place is also prevalent on the warm reflection of ‘Historic Times’, which paints pictures of quintessential Mediterranean European scenes while musing on the magic of love, acting as a perfect distillation of the songwriting that's led to a legion of adoring fans following Allo Darlin's journey to date.
While Bright Nights isn’t a country album, the timelessness of folk and country influences weave throughout the record. ‘My Love Will Bring You Home’ might be written about Elizabeth’s young daughters, but it’s a mother’s love song, disguised as a country love song. “It also makes me feel a connection to the place I come from, which is a country town in Queensland, Australia - if I think of myself as a country singer, it makes more sense that I come from Rockhampton.”
On 'You Don’t Think Of Me At All' bassist Bill Botting’s songwriting makes an appearance for the first time on an Allo Darlin’ album, exhibiting his brand of road-trip power pop that he's made his own courtesy of 2017's well-received solo album. “I'm nervous and excited to have this song on the record and I hope people will think of it as a sad banger! It's about the heart break and embarrassment you feel when you figure out someone you maybe think of as a dear friend, just doesn't think of you at all” Bill explains. “It marked a fun change in the recording process, letting someone else be in the spotlight” adds Elizabeth, “especially when that someone is Bill”.
‘Slow Motion’ showcases Elizabeth's Morris’ skill of crafting songs that are both vulnerable and poignant. “I wrote Slow Motion after reading Lucinda Williams’ autobiography. I wanted to try writing a song that was just telling a simple story. I wrote it in about 10 minutes, about a car crash I had while I was pregnant and my eldest daughter was in the backseat. It felt good to make a song out of a situation that was frightening, to turn that into art. The recording on the album is a live take, which we have found is the best way for me to record these types of songs.”
Allo Darlin's songs work because, to borrow from Don Draper's Kodak Carousel pitch in Mad Men, they take us to a place where we feel loved. Emotional trust falls, they often take us to parts of ourselves we've either suppressed or have yet to discover and then are always there to catch us if and when we get there. In a changeable world, the warm embrace of their new record is as needed as it is welcome.
Live Dates
5th April - Cologne PopFest, Germany
7th October - Nottingham, Old Cold Store
9th October - London, EartH Hall
10th October - Glasgow, Stereo
11th October - Manchester, Band on the Wall
Allo Darlin' were formed in 2008 after Australian Elizabeth Morris arrived in London and bought a ukulele from the Duke of Uke shop in Shoreditch. Like a whole host of Australian musicians before her, Morris had headed to London to realise her musical ambitions, a young woman with the small instrument in the big city with even bigger ideas. Once there happenstance, chance encounters and a Bruce Springsteen cover for a compilation would all conspire to create the crack squad that has endured, Morris being joined by fellow Brisbanite Bill Botting and the British duo of Michael Collins and Paul Rains.
From its first line (“Will you go out with me tonight, lose it on a disco floor?”), their self-titled debut released in 2010 fizzed with the effervescent, intoxicating energy and excitement of the opportunities and experiences it offered. From frosty night buses through to fiscal inadequacy and everything in between, it was an album which presented the city as a blank canvas where everything was fair game for romanticising and celebrating, and a world where most of life's tribulations could be solved with the warm embrace of a loved one. Fresh, bright and unashamedly hopeful and idealistic, blissful exuberance ran through it like the sound of a band in love with being in a band.
Writing in his 1200 word essay on the album for Australia's The Monthly (later featuring in his writing compilation Ten Rules Of Rock And Roll), former Go-between Robert Forster suggested that the band “now have doors open before them”. Thus follow-up Europe could be viewed as the album The Go-Betweens dared them to make, culminating in the sparkling pop perfection (and throwback to Morris' native Queensland) of lead single 'Capricornia'. Their sophomore effort simultaneously looked at the Europe of her present alongside the Australia of her past, offering a stunning reflection on belonging and sense of place and a band at their most dazzlingly technicolour that built on the eagerness and immediacy of the debut with contemplation, sophistication and ambition.
Successor, 2014’s ‘We Come From The Same Place’ dwelt on belonging in terms of new beginnings and documented Morris' journey into a new chapter in her life, resulting in an album that saw her flit between the uncertainty of starting anew and post-resettlement confidence.
Allo Darlin's songs work because, to borrow from Don Draper's Kodak Carousel pitch in Mad Men, they take us to a place where we feel loved. Emotional trust falls, they often take us to parts of ourselves we've either suppressed or have yet to discover and then are always there to catch us if and when we get there.
