It's been a hot minute since we caught up with Niki Colet. From her early singles like 'One Day' and 'You Still Show Up in My Dreams', to later gems such as 'I Wish' and 'Big City', to her exquisite previous EP Endless Summer - we've been big fans of the Filipino singer-songwriter's for a long time now.

After making her mark as one of Southeast Asia's brightest musical prospects, the Manila-born artist moved to London in 2022, where she spent the next couple of years independently crafting a stunning new statement called We Only Ever Meet in Strange Dreams.

Recorded with producer Alex Haines, this project is described as a "labour of love", and it shows. The 4-track effort finds Colet shifting from her indie-folk roots to an ethereal alt-pop realm. The result is a tender sonic exploration of loss and longing that you can both sob and dance to.

We spoke to the Colet to find out more about her wonderful new album.

 

 

 

 

 

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'Getaway Car'

'Getaway Car' was the first song we recorded in the studio. I met my producer, Alex Haines, because he was a regular at the coffee shop where I was working as a barista in North London. We met up to speak about working on a project together, and set up an initial meeting at his studio – kind of like a trial day for the both of us. I played him this chorus, which I’d had in my back pocket for a long time, and we both got really excited about it. He put down a basic chord progression on his Juno-60 synth, and I started writing scrap lyrics and sample melodies for verses. By the end of the day, the track was done – I had finished writing the song and Alex had put down a pretty rich base for the general instrumental arrangement. 

Sonically, I felt inspired by a lot of retro trip-hop and electro-pop music, like Massive Attack, One Dove, Zero7, Chicane. There’s an incredible Prince remix of the Martika song 'Love…Thy Will Be Done' (which he originally wrote) and the booming percussions on that remix track were a huge influence for the overall sound of 'Getaway Car'. I love how it echoes. We also looked at contemporary alternative music – I love what artists like Mk.gee and ML Buch do with their guitar sounds, and we wanted to capture the same languid tones. The first verse pays homage to the song 'Darkness' by alternative rock band Pinegrove — in the line “Carried you with me / Still, you had darkness on your mind.” That Pinegrove reference is in there for sentimental reasons — I still can’t listen to 'Darkness' without crying. Melodically, the choruses are pretty anthemic, but Alex and I were intentional about leaving lots of space – we thought it would be really interesting to have a fairly pared-back, sparse production for an almost rock ballad-like melodic structure.

'Ghosts'

'Ghosts' was the first track I wrote for the record, and I wrote it before I even met up with Alex. It was the one song I knew for sure that I wanted to have on the EP before I started the project to begin with. It started off as a verse that was in my mind for years, initially inspired by the rawness of rock and new wave music by artists like Wreckless Eric, Primal Scream, T.Rex, Modern Lovers, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 'Whole Wide World' by Wreckless Eric was a huge sonic compass for me, as was 'Maps' by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I was very proud of this one verse I had, but for so long I was unable to finish the song, or even come up with a chorus. But in early January this year, I’d arrived back to London from New York after the new year in the middle of an intense situation, full of all these feelings I couldn’t hold, and I found myself craving to put them into the vessel of this song. I spent this one winter evening writing it (bouncing off the first verse I had come up with years before), recorded a rough live demo, and posted it on my Instagram at like 2am. I got such a positive response to it that I felt like I could make the leap and start working on this record.

Although I initially wrote it with an acoustic guitar, in my mind the song had a chug on an electric guitar. That chug was such an important element – almost like a character in the song. One of my favorite songs of all time is 'Don’t Delete The Kisses' by Wolf Alice, and we drew from the structure of that song’s production by including a continuous pulsing synth playing throughout the entire song in the background, like a thread running through the track from start to finish. It’s also the only track on the record that has live drums, which was a stretch for my budget at the time, but both Alex and I felt it was really important to have it in. There’s also a bit at the end that I love – the last chorus has me shouting in the background. I literally stood at one end of the recording booth and shouted the lyrics from a distance towards the microphone. We recorded this 5 times and then layered the shouting in the background – it makes the last chorus sound as cathartic as the emotion it’s trying to capture.

'Devil On My Shoulder'

We struggled to find the perfect balance, production-wise, for this song, and I’m so proud of the shape it ended up taking. I wanted this track to have an almost lazy, droning feel to it, and referenced songs like 'Changes' by Antwon and Kerry McCoy, 'Slow' by Florence Sinclair, stuff by Blood Orange, Tirzah, Dijon. We started off with a little drum machine sound that reminded us of an early Mac DeMarco track, and then built it up from there.

The first verse starts off with such a mundane scene: getting the intuitive, almost psychic sense that your ex is probably seeing somebody new, going online to see what this new lover looks like, and then being hit by a wave of sadness over the notion that someone who used to be your person probably never loved you the way you wanted them to, if you could have been so quickly replaced, and if they feel like it could be so easy to crawl back into your life again if they changed their mind. You feel erasable, and it’s so complicated to sit in the feeling of missing someone you never want to see again. The song feels like a gritty lullaby, or like a late ‘90s slow dance. It’s the bittersweet sound of saying goodbye even though you don’t want to, but you know you should.

'Strange Dreams'

'Strange Dreams' took a truly strange shape with the role it played in my life, in an almost meta way. It’s the last track on the EP, and was the last song I wrote and recorded – so it feels like an amalgamation of the previous tracks sonically. It’s also the track that feels the most like crying on the dance floor, which was a feeling that felt so important for me to capture on this record. I was in the thick of heartbreak and going out a lot, and dance music had become almost sacred to me during this time. There are a lot of elements of dance music that inspired the production of this track. 'Dancing on My Own' by Robyn, famously the perfect song, was almost like a talisman for this track — I returned to it over and over while going through the process of writing, recording, and producing it. At the time I was also listening a lot to Avalon Emerson’s pop project, Avalon Emerson & the Charm, and Nabihah Iqbal’s Dreamer — there was something about pop/rock projects by artists who were traditionally DJs and electronic musicians that I really enjoyed.

Of all the songs, it’s the one that feels like a surrender. Unintentionally, all the tracks on the EP are full of questions – why do I go walking around like it’s fine, I don’t really know what I was looking for, why do I keep holding you close when all you do is fade. There’s so much uncertainty and not-knowing subsumed in the lyrics of each song on the project. 'Strange Dreams' is full of questions too, but it also answers itself – there’s that lyric in the chorus, “Where do I put all this wanting so it doesn’t burn / Only one way / Let it break first”, and in that way it feels like a release. 

Sonically, it just coasts. I think it occupies a slightly unusual structure, because the chorus feels more like a pre-chorus melodically. And in that way, you get the drop, the big anthemic moment, in the space between, when there are no words and it’s only the music washing over you.