Night Palace is a shocking alchemy: achingly intense nostalgia meets frothy anticipation of what’s beyond the garden wall. It’s hard to believe Night Palace’s first album Diving Rings is not a soundtrack to a different world. You find yourself picturing it: a moonlit-gilded diorama of frontwoman Avery Draut’s dreams and memories.

Growing up, Draut would wake to her dad blasting Court and Spark or Nilsson Schmilsson as he danced around the living room, riling the dogs. At school in Athens, Georgia she studied visual art and theatre before focusing on classical voice. Burned out after five years of fruitful but intensive opera performance, she found a Magic Genie™ organ at the thrift store and sat down, for the first time, to write songs of her own.

Draut’s early explorations into the local music scene held a magic specific to the artistic incubator of Athens: she duetted on Jackson 5 songs with of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes at her best friend’s wedding, and opened for Kishi Bashi, singing Hebrew folks songs in a chamber ensemble.

In 2016, Draut moved to New York and began composing music for experimental theatre and performing with a new palette of collaborators. She got a job working as a production assistant at The Metropolitan Opera, scribbling timecodes in opera scores. Feeling the familiar inspiration from art forms cooperating, she’d whisper melodies into her phone in the dark of the substage between acts. 

Draut maintained her connection to Athens, watering roots in two artistic ecosystems. Her songs would fall into place on long solo drives down the east coast in her grandma’s old Buick, returning from New York to Athens to record the layers of Diving Rings. The album was recorded by engineer-producer Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, of Montreal), with additional engineering from Andy LeMaster (Better Oblivion Community Center, Azure Ray). The result is a unique brand of atmospheric pop, evoking artists like Broadcast, Alvvays, Vashti Bunyan and Mort Garson. 

Night Palace’s latest single “Enjoy The Moon!” was inspired by a particular moment Draut experienced on tour. “I was half-sleeping on someone’s shoulder while watching a curtain of fruit-shaped beads dangle in the breeze of a fan backstage,” Draut explains. “I loved plastic beaded curtains when I was a kid, and I set this song in the dreamspace that alchemized between my memories and that moment.”

“Enjoy the Moon!” is accompanied by a surreal video co-directed by Draut and Ally White. Draut and White collaborated on concepts for the video during the early stages of the pandemic. Set in a smoky liminal space and a former horse girl’s bedroom window during quarantine, the video depicts an alien-like fever dream encounter. Featuring playful dance sequences and an aesthetic and story shaped by co-director Ally White’s paintings and storytelling, the video pulls visual inspiration from the worlds of Romeo + Juliet (the iconic 1996 movie), Star Trek, and your middle school’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Photo Courtesy: Caroline Marchildon