Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats

Having only released their debut album in the summer of last year, one can only wonder where Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats have been all this time. Their frontman, Rateliff, has been active since 2005, touring with The Lumineers and releasing secret albums like Falling Faster Than You Can Run all over the place, as well as featuring in the film Austin To Boston, a documentary which premiered at the London Film Festival about four bands touring the length of America in five crappy VW campers, aka the best premise for a film to have ever been premised. The documentary was described by the Guardian as “boundless, beautiful and thoroughly joyous”, a description that transfers pretty well to Rateliff’s Americana-soul-style music. Songs like my personal favourite, I Need Never Get Old, are euphoric, intense and incredibly easy to dance to. The band itself is comprised of seven members in total (even more than McBusted), playing everything from bass to keyboard to saxophone well and with genuine passion, so expect the live show to have the kind of vitality that cannot be captured in studio tracks. Watching Rateliff and his band perform live is a guaranteed night of proper US-roots joy, which just so happens to be in Bristol for one night only.