The Nude Party

For The Nude Party, nearly a decade has flown by in the blink of an eye. In that time, the New York-based band has released a pair of well-received albums, an EP, and played countless shows. Prior to the pandemic, the band was really starting to hit its stride. They had a system in place and were spreading their brand of melodic rock to the masses. In fact, they could count Jack White, Arctic Monkeys, and Orville Peck as vocal supporters, which led to support slots for each. Soon, incredible live appearances at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Newport Folk Festival, and Shaky Knees became the norm.

In late 2020, The Nude Party released its sophomore album, Midnight Manor, which debuted at #1 on the Alternative New Artists Album Chart. The sextet was unable to tour behind it and compared its release to skipping a stone over a raging river. A byproduct was that it showed the band that on their third album, they couldn’t lean on their tried-and-true method of testing out new material live and then hunker down to record.

Instead of sitting around, the band got busy. Setting up shop in their Upstate New York headquarters, the group used the funds they’d saved and spent a year building a studio space out of a barn. Tired of paying for studio time and being rushed, The Nude Party methodically worked at their own pace. Out were the sessions lasting a strict handful of days. In were impromptu writing moments and picking every sound as they went along.

When the band met the Tampa based engineer Matthew Horner, they discovered that they had the opposite problems: Matthew had a collection of incredible gear with no studio and The Nude Party had a great new studio with no gear. So they invited him to move his equipment up to the Catskills to record an album together. Such was the origin of the band’s third album, Rides On.

Unlike their first two albums, The Nude Party decided to produce Rides On themselves. With their new space and the help of Horner, The Nude Party had as much fun creating as they ever had at any other point in their career. The lack of pressure allowed them to record over 20 songs, including some that dabbled in electro-pop and stripped-down country before settling on the final 14 songs.