Night Verses

Fullerton first, Los Angeles second

The partnership predates the name. Guitarist Nick DePirro, bassist Reilly Herrera and drummer Aric Improta had been playing together for about a decade under a succession of different banners out of Fullerton, in Orange County, before any of it settled. Night Verses proper was formed in Los Angeles in 2012, after the three met vocalist Douglas Robinson at a charity event and finally had a line-up that held. The self-released EP Out of the Sky appeared the same year.

The writing habits formed in those Fullerton rooms are the ones that still define the band. Parts interlock rather than stack behind a lead voice, and the drum kit carries melody as often as it keeps time — an arrangement logic that would turn out to be unusually well suited to a band that was about to lose its singer.

Two records with a voice, then none

Lift Your Existence arrived in 2013 through Easy Killer and Southworld. Into the Vanishing Light followed in 2016, the band's first for Equal Vision Records in partnership with Graphic Nature, and the record that pushed them out of the Southern Californian club circuit and onto larger bills.

In September 2017 Robinson left. The obvious move was to audition replacements; the three did not make it. They carried on as a trio and rebuilt the material around the absence rather than papering over it. From the Gallery of Sleep, released in 2018 on Equal Vision, was the first Night Verses album with no vocals at all, and the one that established the reputation they still trade on — Noisey described them around that point as the Salvador Dalí of progressive metal, which is a strange compliment but not an inaccurate one for music that keeps dissolving its own structures.

The double album

Then the band went quiet as a recording act for five years. Improta filled the gap with other work, most visibly behind the kit in Fever 333. When Night Verses resurfaced it was with the single "Arrival" — their first new music in half a decade — written, the band said, with reference to the drives the three had taken together through the desert, and pitched as something a listener would finish in their own surroundings.

"Karma Wheel" came next and brought the album announcement with it: Every Sound Has a Color in the Valley of Night, issued in two halves by Equal Vision, with Part 1 out on 15 September 2023 and Part 2 following in 2024 behind the single "Glitching Prisms". The band framed the record as an assessment of human rituals and the power they hold, each piece composed with a different physical environment in mind.

It is also the album where they started letting other people in. Part 1 carries the first guest feature in the band's discography, Tool bassist Justin Chancellor on "Séance". Part 2 added Brandon Boyd of Incubus, Anthony Green of Circa Survive on "Slow Dose", and Author & Punisher on "Åska". Distorted Sound gave the finished thing nine out of ten, calling it finely tuned and expertly executed and crediting the band with handling serious polyrhythmic complexity without tipping into self-indulgence — contemplative post-rock stretches on one side, metallic weight on the other, with "Arrival", "Love in a Liminal Space" and the closing "Phoenix V Invocation" singled out.

Where they stand in October 2026

The last three years have been built on support slots of a kind most instrumental bands never get offered. In November 2023 Night Verses were announced as support for Tool's spring 2024 European tour, which put them in arenas across the continent; by August 2024 the stories coming out of that run were about Chancellor pranking them on stage. Later in 2024 they joined Animals as Leaders for the tenth-anniversary European tour behind The Joy of Motion, a pairing that reached the Roundhouse in London on 15 March 2025.

In August 2025 they released Live Sessions: Volume 1 through Equal Vision, their first live material of any kind, recorded at Sound Emporium in Nashville with Meinl Percussion. It runs to four tracks — "Desire to Feel Nothing", "Plague Dancer", "8 Gates of Pleasure" and a revisited "Harmonic Sleep Engine". Improta's explanation was characteristically unfussy: the band had never put out anything live, so it was a chance to test how well they could interpret the songs together in a room. That September they headlined their own UK and European run with DVNE in support, including The Dome in London on 12 September 2025.

The current chapter was set on 3 June 2026, when Plini announced the An Unnameable Desire North American headline tour with Night Verses and Portraits — 31 shows from 6 October to 8 November 2026, tickets on sale from 5 June. Night Verses take the middle slot. Improta's other band, House of Protection, formed with Stephen Harrison and signed to Red Bull Records, has kept its own release schedule running alongside, with "Afterlife" in February 2025 and "Godspeed" that August. No new Night Verses album has been announced.

The remaining dates

With the tour now past its midpoint, the run finishes through the Midwest and down the West Coast: Cleveland's Globe Iron on 23 October, St Andrew's Hall in Detroit on 24 October, Metro in Chicago on 25 October, the Fine Line in Minneapolis on 26 October and the Madrid Theatre in Kansas City on 27 October, then the Gothic Theatre in Englewood on 29 October and The Depot in Salt Lake City on 30 October. November brings Revolution Hall in Portland on the 1st, the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on the 3rd, Ventura Music Hall on the 7th and the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles — effectively a home show — on the 8th.

The venues are a fair measure of where the band sits: 1,000 to 1,500-capacity rooms as a support act, which is roughly the scale they headline on their own in Europe. The arena bills with Tool were an invitation rather than a promotion, and the trio have spent the time since converting that exposure into a club and theatre circuit they can fill without a singer.