07/08/2026
More reviews. Better late than never...
Kodeine – Light Sleepers
There’s a particular hour when the world hasn’t quite decided whether it’s night or morning. Streetlights are still burning, windows are dark, and everything familiar looks faintly displaced. Light Sleepers, Kodeine’s 2025 album, seems to exist in that hour.
At 34 minutes, it’s an economical record, but one with an expansive imagination. Kodeine have never sounded particularly interested in staying inside the lines of straightforward indie rock, and Light Sleepers finds them moving further into the spaces between songs, memories and places.
It begins with “Poliakoff”, an instrumental that feels less like an opening track than the first scene of a film. From there, “4th Of July” and “Since I Found My Tribe” establish the album’s mixture of melody and unease, before “Gospel Oak” introduces one of the record’s recurring qualities: the transformation of ordinary places into something strangely cinematic.
Kodeine's influences are worn lightly but knowingly. Two tracks provide particularly revealing clues. “Margaret” is a Kevin Ayers song, while “The Ghost In You” is a Psychedelic Furs composition. Both artists are significant influences on Kodeine, and their presence here feels less like namechecking than a conversation with two important strands of the band's musical DNA.
“The Ghost In You” is especially interesting because Kodeine don't simply reproduce the sound of the original. The Psychedelic Furs' version is famously built around its distinctive synthesizer-led arrangement; Kodeine turn that formula on its head, replacing the synth-driven foundation with guitars. The effect is to pull the song away from its polished, atmospheric 1980s setting and into something more organic and indie-rock oriented. It's recognisable, but newly framed — the same song seen through a different window.
“Margaret”, meanwhile, points towards the stranger, more whimsical side of Kevin Ayers. Ayers had a gift for allowing melancholy, eccentricity and tenderness to coexist without ever becoming predictable. That sensibility fits naturally with Kodeine's own fascination with characters, images and situations that seem slightly detached from everyday reality.
But Light Sleepers isn't content simply to explore its influences. Its most intriguing moments arrive when Kodeine take unexpected departures.
“Higher Than The Sky” is the album's great left turn. Suddenly the atmosphere changes and an EDM-inflected disco beat takes over, introducing a dancefloor pulse that seems deliberately out of place — and therefore completely at home. After the guitars and more familiar alternative textures elsewhere, the electronic rhythm gives the album a jolt of movement.
It's a reminder that Kodeine aren't interested in treating genre as a set of rules. Psychedelic pop, alternative rock, keyboards, guitar-driven reinterpretation and electronic disco can all occupy the same record without necessarily cancelling one another out.
That willingness to take detours is one of Light Sleepers' strengths. The album doesn't present a single, carefully packaged version of Kodeine. Instead, it feels like a collection of different musical impulses held together by a consistent atmosphere and an instinct for melody.
The final sequence — “The Ghost In You”, “Namaste” and the title track — brings the album back towards its nocturnal centre. After the unexpected propulsion of “Higher Than The Sky”, the closing songs feel like the lights gradually dimming again.
It would be easy to underestimate an album this understated. There are no obvious stadium gestures and no desperate attempts to manufacture a defining moment. Instead, Kodeine have made something more elusive — a record that rewards the listener for leaning in.
The Psychedelic Furs and Kevin Ayers are audible influences, but Light Sleepers isn't an exercise in imitation. Kodeine take the Furs' synth-driven song and give it guitars. They take Ayers' eccentricity as inspiration without attempting to reproduce it. Then, just when the listener thinks they have the album figured out, an EDM disco beat arrives.
That unpredictability is the point.
Light Sleepers is an album of musical ghosts, unexpected turns and half-lit spaces — familiar enough to recognise, strange enough to keep you listening.
★★★★☆
