“Some people won’t listen to the album based on the artwork. I’ve had to come to terms with that,” says Josh Greacen, a member of Somerset-born music duo Sad Night Dynamite alongside Archie Blagden. It’s a strange realisation to arrive at, particularly when it concerns their debut album, Welcome the Night. The record is about making sense of things in their 20s and, having not found all of the answers, embracing the darkness, the unknown. “We’re playing the antagonist a lot of the time in the album, in the lyrics. We’re not perfect.” It teed them up for a conceptually rich album campaign which incidentally saw them become the antagonists.

One of their earlier singles from the campaign, Sugabby, gave them a taste of this. It came with a music video in which Greacen is dating someone called Mrs Dior, who is a fair bit older than him. The video carried over into a wider stunt on social media where a fictional beef between the group and Mrs Dior took place, the lines between truth and fiction becoming blurred. “We realised – and we knew this to begin with – how difficult it is to translate irony to people on social media. It’s actually almost impossible,” says Greacen. While engaged fans got it, passers-by were less keen. “But the whole point of it was supposed to be like, don’t believe what you see on social media. We were trying to do it in an artistic way.”

“The issue that we found was that nobody has enough time to understand things on social media on any kind of deep level, which is fair enough,” says Greacen. “I’m the same, I’m no different. You scroll past something. You decide quickly if you like it or you don’t like it and then you move on. And this relates to the whole AI thing as well, of this kind of kneejerk reaction to things, which is the world that we live in these days. I’m not angry about it. It’s more just interesting.”