No Kind of Rider Consider the Possibility of Too Many Wild Nights with “Sophia” (premiere)

“Sophia” is the latest track to be released by No Kind of Rider in advance of their debut album, Savage Coast, which comes out on 13 July. The five members originally hail from Tulsa, but they’ve called Rip City home for some time now (and drummer Jon Van Patten recently moved to Brooklyn). “Sophia”, lead singer Samuel Alexander explains, was inspired by after-hours life in Portland. “We had an epic night once where Joe [Page, keyboardist] and I ended up running into a crowd of 5,000 naked people on bicycles, getting taken to an underground gay bar and sitting in the dining room of a stranger’s house talking about Blonde Redhead at 3:00 am,” he says. “We were roommates and so we walked home in the twilight, straight down the middle of the empty streets. There’s both real beauty and danger in those kind of nights. This song is about doing that 200 times and what it does to a person.”

“All of us lazy logicals / We leave our hearts behind / They tell you when you’re young / Don’t be so blind,” Alexander intones in the introduction, but after Van Patten, Page, bassist Wes Johnson and guitarist Jeremy Louis have built up anxious, sweaty layers of space-dub-post-rock, his perspective shifts, and in the final refrain he wonders what happens when you have “Too many nights of fun / Too many nights of freedom.” The song is not necessarily an anthem for responsible living, but perhaps it asks questions about the endless pursuit of good times. It’s cool to get a good night’s sleep every once in a while, too.