“Our daytime and night-time selves can be entirely different,” Huang Jing, lead singer of 完美倒立 [The Upside Down], tells Apple Music. “The ideas we hide deep down may only awaken at night. A familiar, lingering loneliness and those faint, wordless thoughts transform into shallow wavelets that ripple in the silent night sky.” Having plied dreamy, romantic waters since their inception in 2016, the indie pop group turn their sights further into the darkness on their third album, 夜色碳酸 [Bubble Night]. “A frisson followed by a long loneliness—it feels like carbonation,” Huang says in reference to the title and theme. The album’s eight tracks—split evenly between Chinese- and English-language songs—span the night hours, from city-pop hued “寂静夏日傍晚” [“Still summer evening”] and its smooth sax and dusky vibes to shimmering, beat-free “No Tears In The Morning”, with its gorgeous vocal harmonies. “That one’s an earnest inner monologue,” says guitarist and bassist Tu Yeqin. “We aimed for a simple, honest arrangement that retained the natural flow of emotions.” Tu also conceived of the unsteady, hazy beat of murmur-rapped “像你不曾在我世界出现” [“As if you were never part of my world”] that mirrors the second-guessing that arrives with the light of day. “The piano loop was improvised one drunken morning,” Tu says. “Maybe my mood was stuck in the conversational atmosphere of the night before, but I thought rap fit quite nicely.” But most of the album lingers on the emotions that gradually surface during long periods of quiet darkness, as in the languid “恍神的夜风” [“Dazzling night wind”]. “It’s about those tiny, imperceptible perturbations of our stable emotions that are present only during momentary mental gaps,” Huang says. “I love the night wind—it has the power to quietly stir up thoughts and then gently soothe them.” Huang describes the hypnotically chaotic “mess up.” as her favourite song on the album. “It’s relaxed, ambiguous, flirtatious and sexy,” she says. “It gives me the feeling of an ambivalent, messy emotional state fraught with contradiction—but strangely sweet at the same time.” She wrote the vocal melody and lyrics after hearing a simple bass/synth/drum loop that Tu worked up. “This song was written the quickest,” Tu adds. “With the synth in place, I basically assembled the whole structure in my mind. And after the lead melody was written, the singer’s emotions sparked lots of new ideas to expand the arrangement.” By contrast, “美好的糟糕决定” [“Perfectly awful decision”], a swinging dream-pop number, came together far more slowly. “The melody goes back to the end of 2022—but the arrangement went through multiple revisions,” Huang says. “Even after we recorded it, Tu kept considering other possibilities. Who knows, maybe we’ll perform a special version at future gigs.” The song’s lyrics harken back to ephemeral effervescence of the album title. “It’s a simultaneously awful and beautiful feeling,” she says. “Night is a witness to those stirrings of emotion. We’ve all experienced those moments—and that’s a beautiful thing.”