If you’ve been following the band recently, you’ll know that the gears are turning for the fourth Villainy chapter. We released ‘Happy Waste’ back in April, which set the tone for this new phase - big, direct, and focused on how the energy will translate when we’re performing on stage in front of people.
We supported the ‘Happy Waste’ release with a whirlwind tour, playing four vastly different shows in a single weekend. We went from a scrappy, energetic gig powered by a generator beneath the Tauranga Harbour Bridge, through to the massive Rock Stage at Hamilton’s Homegrown Festival (the video for ‘Happy Waste’ is a montage of behind-the-scenes and show footage from that tour - you can watch that here). ‘Happy Waste’ went on to sit atop the Radioscope Rock chart for 19 consecutive weeks - a massive start to this new era for the band.
To follow this up and keep the ball rolling, we’ve just released our new single ‘Demons’ (September 4th), so this feels like a good opportunity to unpack a bit of the process behind our new music and how we’ve approached composing together as a group.
The Seven-Year Space Between
It’s been seven years since we released our third album, Raised in the Dark (2019). Seven years is a long time between drinks. Many bands’ entire lifespans will have happened - forming, creating, and breaking up - within that time. My son is seven years old; he was seven weeks old when the last record came out. I’ve been happily married for a year and a half, but I hadn’t even met my wife back in 2019. Similarly, my bandmates in Villainy have all seen significant life events since then. We’ve all grown, experienced more, and developed our perspectives.
The fact that we’re still meeting up, making music, and playing shows alongside all these changes is a real privilege. It’s a testament to what the band has become for us and for fans of our music, and we don’t take it for granted. But because so much had changed since our last album, the way we worked on new music together would inevitably be somewhat different.
This is likely familiar to anyone who’s been part of a long-standing band or artist project. Even though you’ve been around for a long time and have built up a tonne of experience and expertise in what you do, creating music for a new album project is different every time. It’s a massive undertaking. Some things about how you approach music-making and collaboration might stay the same, but in my experience, the process for every album I’ve been involved in has been largely new and unique.
Writing in Isolation & Writing Together
Since our last record, we’ve approached writing and composing in various ways and built a significant backlog of over 100 demos. Some of these came about during the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020-2021, when we wrote in isolation and met up via weekly video calls to share our work.
While being apart was by no means the ideal scenario for a band that loves getting loud in a rehearsal room sweatbox, the unusual new constraints foisted upon us during that time forced us to come up with new ideas in ways that we hadn’t worked before. Because of that, and the experimental rabbit holes each of us went down on our own, the period produced the most diverse and genre-stretching collection of demos we’ve made (for better or worse) and helped expand our creative palettes as a group of composers.
The 100-Demo Backlog and Finding Our Flow
Once we were able to get back in the room together, we continued bringing new ideas to the table, but it took quite some time to find our groove. This was partly because we’d been apart, and partly because we were looking for different producers to work with, but ultimately it still felt like we were figuring out how we wanted to approach working together for the next chapter.
While we had no shortage of raw compositional material to work with, the sheer range of styles and concepts spread across those 100+ demos meant that the problem wasn’t coming up with ideas; it was figuring out how to distil them into something that sounded like Villainy, and how we might pull the right ones together to form a cohesive body of work that could become a fourth album. At some point, that massive backlog of ideas became intimidating when we still hadn’t figured out a way forward that made sense for the band.
I felt a noticeable shift in momentum when we came up with the early version of ‘Demons’. After years of work that, while productive, hadn’t yet revealed the path toward our new record, composing this track seemed like an inflection point. It may have helped that it was the first brand-new piece of music in a while that emerged from good old jamming and in-person compositional development, perhaps proving to ourselves that we still had what it takes to pull this off.
Neill (vocals/guitar) shared this moment of change from his perspective in a recent post about the ‘Demons’ single release (note that ‘Rest of Your Life’ was the song’s working title for a while):
“Villainy has been beavering away at our next record for a while now and this tune unlocked a lot for me. The verses and choruses were compiled in the space of a few hours drawing from an idea the band had been working on after we wrapped up our 2025 winter tour.
The journey goes like this (thanks to iPhone voice memos – July 25, 2025). The first voice note starts with me at the gym on a treadmill mumbling the verse (endorphins are great creative boosters) – then a post gym shower develops the chorus and second verse. 15 voice notes later (within an hour) there is one full version titled ‘Rest of Your Life’, guitar in hand.”
In many ways, it’s fitting that the music video for ‘Demons’ is an energetic but ultimately simple bandroom performance of the track. This is a sacred space for us, where we’ve spent so much time together over the years, and where these new songs have been forged.
Watch the video for ‘Demons’ below.
Creative Perseverance
Pushing through that creative adversity in the practice room didn’t just spark the early ideas for what became the track we’ve just released in ‘Demons’, but it also gave us the creative momentum to finally tackle many of the other tracks we’d been trying to pull together from those disparate demo ideas. From that point, the accelerator pedal has been planted, and we’re excited to share the results of all that work as we continue to roll it out over the coming months.
ICYMI: My Latest Release
Copycat EP 01 is a collection of covers dedicated to artists who have influenced my musical identity. It was a gratifying creative challenge to transform the songs into something new with the sonic fingerprint of n1ghtmar3cat while retaining what made them special to me in the first place.
I Like this story Dave, resonates with me.
The thing is… Change is Constant 😉. But also “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” (thanks Rush, oh, and the French!). Both can be right, at the same time too.
it’s great that you’re finding ways to continue to do the things you want to find time for.
Which is, as i think you know, what my intent with being here on substack is.
Always good to read about how others are getting on doing it, might well pick up a few pointers myself too.
Nice post. Cheers.
Rad insight! All the best on the rest of the process. From someone whose band formed, peaked & broke up in the span of your band’s two releases 😂