Interview: Vampire Valentine

Photo by Olivia Harris

Emerging from Newcastle’s darker edges, Vampire Valentine return with Pale Dawn, a debut EP that sharpens everything they’ve been building towards. Formed in the city’s growing darkwave and post‑punk underground, the band have spent the past year carving out a sound that feels fully realised: brooding synths, deliberate pacing and vocals that sit somewhere between confession and confrontation.

Pale Dawn follows their early singles Skin and Tears, both of which set the tone for the record’s atmosphere — precise, heavy with feeling, and uninterested in softening the edges. It arrives only months after their first full‑length Dry Remains, the release that caught the attention of US label Morella Records and led to the band becoming the label’s first signing.

With Pale Dawn now out in the world, we caught up with the band to talk about building their sound, the pull of darker aesthetics, and what it means to create work that refuses to look away.

How did Vampire Valentine first come together as a project?
Vampire Valentine first started out as an idea between me and Kieron. We had a shared interest in the post-punk and goth genres and their many sub-genres. We kept saying we should start a band, and after thinking about it, we thought, why not? So we officially started Vampire Valentine in October 2025. We both started writing. I was heavily focused on darkwave and modern post-punk, influenced by She Past Away and post-punk revival bands like Rendez Vous, and Kieron was leaning towards classic post-punk, influenced by Bauhaus and Joy Division. I quickly recruited my friend Ricky, whom I knew from the cyberpunk and darksynth scene; we wrote the Porcelain EP in around a week or two. We just kept the ball rolling from there, and now we’re here.

You were Morella Records’ inaugural signing — how has that shaped your growth as a band?
Getting the email that the label wanted us as their inaugural signing was a surprise to us. Kieron and I got the video call to confirm our signing to the label at Coffee and Bean in the town, and we came out of that cafe with a boost in confidence, which pushed us to really throw ourselves into the project and made us stronger as a group. Since then we’ve been putting all of our free time into the project and recorded some tracks that we are impatiently waiting to release. The label itself is the best; we get complete control over the work we put out and how we choose to promote and release it.

Goth, darkwave and post-punk have seen a real resurgence recently; why do you think that is, and where do you see yourselves within that landscape?
I think as a band we all agree that there are multiple reasons as to why the goth movement as a whole is making a resurgence, but a main player in it is the rise in the younger generation discovering the music, the values and the overall goth aesthetic through social media, with apps like TikTok and Instagram being a major factor. There’s also just been a rise in gothic media in Hollywood. Ricky made a good point on this, saying, “I think there are multiple reasons why goth music is having a resurgence right now. It could be because of how dark and dystopian things are in the world right now, and this music reflects that.” As for where we think we see ourselves in the overall landscape, I don’t know. We are a very new band on the scene at the moment and relatively underground, so we haven’t made that much impact, but hopefully after these next releases and a few live shows under our belt, that will change.

Tell us about Pale Dawn — how does it sound, and what themes run through it?
Pale Dawn, unlike Dry Remains, doesn’t follow a narrative; we open and close the EP with two cinematic and dark ambient instrumentals composed by Ricky that give off our gothic overtones, but the rest of the tracks are very different from each other. I think this EP is more to be looked at as a little compilation of tracks that we made to experiment with what direction the next album was going to be in and what changes we would take on for the next release. There’s a reason each song sounds so different from the other, minus the intro and outro. Our songwriting as of now has relatively stayed the same; we’re always sharing demos that each of us made and passing stems between each other. Saying that Ricky is in the USA and Tony is in Germany, we’re limited to one way to record. We hope to get a few additional members to play live with, so in time we plan to record in a studio setting.

How does this EP differ from your debut album Dry Remains?
Our producer Ricky, answered this question perfectly; he said, “I think Pale Dawn was kind of about experimentation for us. We are further expanding our sound and trying new things with this EP. Especially the track, Pulse, in my opinion, is quite different from most of our other tracks so far.” He’s right; this EP was really us experimenting with what we liked and what we wanted to do. I don’t think we’ll make another track like Pulse (unless people like it). Dry Remains was very DIY; we had no label backing, and one of us was in another country. We enjoyed it for what it was, but we have definitely evolved past that point now, and we are all very pleased with the new direction we are heading towards.

What do you hope listeners take away from the release?
We hope that the main takeaway from this release for the listeners is that they finish it wanting more, as we really couldn’t be more excited to reveal what we have been working on over the past few months, as Pale Dawn is really the start of everything for us as a band; if we can leave the listener with some sort of positive thought on us, we’ll be happy.

What’s next for Vampire Valentine?
The future of Vampire Valentine is very exciting. We’ve been working extremely hard on a new album that will hopefully cement our feet into the scene indefinitely, showcasing all of our individual strengths. We are also hoping for live shows to start up this year; we’re just waiting on a live guitarist for lead and rhythm to join the band, and then we are ready to go on that front (if anyone wants to throw their hat in). There’s lots of other stuff in the pipeline, but I don’t think the label will let us reveal more than we already have, haha.