You can either spend your teens and twenties following the rules, and have an early mid-life crisis in your thirties or forties. Or you do your early adulthood right and live fast and make mistakes. It’s the founding ethos of rock’n’roll and the preferred route of The Regrettes frontwoman turned solo pop artist Lydia Night. “As an artist, I feel like it’s so easily excused to be messy, especially romantically – but only if you write about it,” she says. “It’s making these decisions for art versus for long-term success in life and happiness. And I still don’t know where the line is.”
That line is being increasingly scrambled in today’s chaotic mainstream pop space, whether it’s Charli XCX’s visceral party anthems, Chappell Roan’s queer messiness or Sabrina Carpenter’s devilishly coy sexual provocations. Rarely does it come from a performer who has built a million social media followers of genuine fans purely from touring the world, cutting her teeth for years on bills with rock and alternative artists like Twenty One Pilots and Yungblud. But now Night, 24, has dropped the guitars and rock band members and has her sights set on being a pop girl, albeit a left-field one, with minimal production and maximum attitude.
We’ve met at a diner in east Los Angeles called Cindy’s, down the road from where she grew up, and her dad still lives. It’s also where she shot the album artwork for her debut solo album Parody of Pleasure, mainly because the diner has an indelible place in her teenage memories. “This was where my friends and I would come secretly hungover during high school,” she says. “So when it came to choosing where to shoot, I was like, ‘Duh, we should obviously shoot there.’”
Night has practically grown up inside the entertainment industry. At just 12 years old, she formed a power rock duo with Marlhy Murphy called Pretty Little Demons, playing guitar and singing lead vocals, which caught the attention of Ryan Gosling. Impressed by their talent, he invited the duo to perform with his own band, Dead Man’s Bones. Two years later, at the age of 14, and with Murphy in tow, she started the garage pop band The Regrettes, inviting musicians she had met through the popular after-school music programme School of Rock. The band were soon signed by Warner and went on to become a respectably successful mid-size group thanks to their punchy pop-punk anthems and lightly feminist agenda.
In person, Night is friendly and droll in a wild child sort of way, helped by her flat LA accent and deadpan humour. In under five minutes of us receiving our coffees, she’s downed hers. “Yes, it’s kind of frightening,” she agrees dryly, after she immediately orders a refill. She acts on impulse, and is happy taking risks. Having always been a huge Gwen Stefani fan, in 2023 Night decided that her No Doubt moment was over and disbanded The Regrettes to spread her wings by herself. “Going solo has felt the most freeing thing in the world,” she says.
Though Night had special moments in The Regrettes, it never felt simple to her. “It wasn’t just that they were hired musicians, but it meant the band became this in-between hybrid, since I was the primary songwriter and it was really always my vision and my passion project,” she explains. “I was also just a child, so being the quote-unquote little boss or even leader of people older than me, it’s naive now, but in my head I was like, ‘Oh, we’re best friends.’” Making things more difficult was the fact she was also in a relationship with the drummer, Maxx Morando, who is now the partner of Miley Cyrus. “The band was all built on this precipice of something that was really complicated.”
The decision to disband the Regrettes was easy. “I wanted to walk away while we were still up instead of starting to [flog] a dead horse. Right now, we could still be touring and making money. But we’d hit a ceiling of what that looks like and I thought, I’m too young and too inspired by other types of music to be content in that.”
Night was born in New Orleans but raised in LA, mostly by her dad, whom she calls her best friend. “My parents split when I was little, little, little,” she recalls. “My mom was dealing with her own stuff and couldn’t move [to LA] for a long time. She had me at 23: so young. In retrospect, I don’t think anyone should have a kid at that age,” she laughs. “Although thank God she did. I’m happy to be here.” Now, she adds, they’re “super close”.
When it came to her new solo career, she wanted it to feel entirely new. So she dropped the guitar and returned to the pop influences of her childhood. “I wanted it to be like I was cosplaying a pop star, playing dress up in my bedroom, pretending to be Britney or Gwen [Stefani],” she says excitedly, noting that was where the concept for the album title, Parody of Pleasure, came from. The songs are notably, almost curiously, sparse, with minimalist garage pop production that forces Night’s confidence and personality centre stage. On her latest single, the distorted sex jam, “Gutter”, there is something of the DIY club feminist sound of Peaches. “I’m feeling like Prince / I wanna be your lover / We could be spies / we could go undercovers,” Night sing-raps playfully.
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![‘I wanted to walk away while we were still up instead of starting to [flog] a dead horse’](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/06/26/8/04/DSP_LEAD.jpg)
The album was written in New York during a long trip where Night decided to say yes to every experience that came her way: nights out, dates, partying. A few of the songs on the record are based on a girl she fell in love with, who only had a week or so left in New York before she moved away. Night hung out “obsessively” with her in the lead-up to her move. “It was bizarre and I felt feelings that I haven’t felt in a really long time – it was so strong and so intense. I still think about her all the time. It’s still one of those things of one day maybe, one day.”
There’s a lot of hedonism and vitality on the album, but it was launched with the first single, “Pity Party”, a melancholic laundry list of complaints in pop song form. One lyric is about her dad dying. “He has cancer, but it’s been a bizarre process because he’s been stage four for seven years,” she says, with the lightly worn weariness of someone who has had to speak about it to strangers many times. “I’m sure anyone who’s had a sick parent can relate; it’s unlike anything I’ve experienced because there’s no real information to trust or relax into because it’s constantly changing. And then there are bizarre switches where it’s like, ‘I have a couple months to live’.”
“Pity Party” was inspired by her growing desire to move permanently to New York and, amid her daydreaming about the pleasures of the city, momentarily forgetting about her dad’s cancer. “Then there’s this rush of guilt that comes in where I’m like, ‘Oh my god, how could I be fantasising about a life away from the sickness and from what’s going on?’” Her dad was unhappy about the idea of her moving and she’s decided that she has some growing up to do here, within the few-mile radius of Cindy’s Diner. “What’s the saying? ‘Everywhere you go, there you are’.”
The thrill of waiting to see how The Regrettes fans connect with her new music is starting to build in Night, who, at least on the surface, comes across as – if not entirely fearless – then as someone who is happy to be bold regardless. “My name is the thing connected to this music,” she says with a deep exhale, after the waitress takes our plates away. “A lot more than with The Regrettes, I’m having to be really particular about what I say yes to and say no to and put out in the world, because this’ll stick with me forever. It’s always gonna be: this is what Lydia Night put into the world!”
‘Gutter’ is out now on Warner Music
