Sleepless Nights made a stunning return in 2017 after a six year hiatus last year with their Keith Hamilton EP. These days Aaron Wallace is championing the Sleepless Nights moniker in Toronto, but he still gets things done back home. In their latest iteration, the band have just released a new single, “Kids On Drugs,” recorded by Joel Plaskett at his New Scotland Yard studio in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and featuring Walrus’s Jordan Murphy on drums.
Sleepless Nights is a band with many moving parts. Some of those parts have moved, while others have moved on entirely. What began fifteen years ago on the east coast as an eight-piece band with two bassists, two drummers, two guitar players and two multi-instrumentalists transformed into a four piece. They made a name for themselves as one of the hardest working bands in Atlantic Canada. Then, as is the fate of many great bands, they drifted off to rejoin the Matrix like Optimus Prime.
But like a good transformer, you can’t keep the franchise from rebooting. While members of Sleepless Nights would go on to form Kuato, Quiet Parade, The Superfantastics and more, the band would reunite for one final EP and tour before Wallace would officially relocate the band to Toronto.
Judging from “Kids On Drugs,” Sleepless Nights, in its new form, has Wallace retaining the digital nu-disco sound of his solo-project, leavened somewhat with a less-broody overlay of surf rock. Having recruited bassist Michael Small (The Meligrove Band, Bankruptcy, Good Enough Live Karaoke) and drummer Myles Deck (Cauldron, Myles Deck & The Fuzz), nouveau Sleepless Nights sounds like The Endless Summer pushed through the Ritalin crunch of the late 90s instead of the carefree 60s. That’s probably to be expected for a song that the band describe as being about “parents who would rather give their kids drugs than offer them guidance.”