INTRODUCING: Thunder Motel

After nearly a decade away from releasing music, Thunder Motel marks a reset — not just creatively, but emotionally. Shaped by years of lived experience, personal growth, and a renewed relationship with songwriting, the project embraces restraint, atmosphere, and connection over excess. With debut single Ignite the Night and follow-up Neon Churches, Thunder Motel opens the doors to a nocturnal, big-city world built on feeling, familiarity, and togetherness. We caught up with Thunder Motel to talk time away, creative restraint, and building a place people can check into.

Thunder Motel arrives after nearly a decade away from releasing music. What changed during that time away, and how did resetting your relationship with music influence the way you approached writing and producing this project?

During that decade away, I lived a lot and grew as an individual. From finding love and travelling, to dealing with grief and loss, there was a huge amount of self-discovery and mental maturing that widened my perspective through those life experiences.

I think pushing yourself to the edge of certain emotions, sitting there, and then looking back at yourself really helps reset who you are and what you want to do. That naturally had a knock-on effect when I came back into the studio, picked up instruments, and opened the sluice gates. At first, a lot of backed-up emotion poured out — trust me when I say the early demos and writing sessions were quite dark and self-reflective.

Once those songs were out of my system, I began to have clearer, fresher ideas about what I wanted to write and produce. With this project, I wanted a sense of relatability and that “big city” sound that yearns to bring people together — an energy, a feeling, something anthemic.

That helped shape the name Thunder Motel, with THUNDER representing something loud, powerful, and beyond our earthly touch, and MOTEL representing a place where people can check in: humble and small, open 24 hours a day, a shelter from the storm or just a bed for the night.

Having previously been featured on BBC Introducing West Yorkshire and played guitar in Thee Deadtime Philharmonic, how did those earlier chapters inform the more restrained, mood-led direction of Thunder Motel?

My earlier projects, or my presence in other projects, were me hurling everything against the wall — an explosion of everything all at once. The mindset was always, “let’s throw everything at it.” During my time away, in other roles in life, I came across a quote that really resonated with me: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away,” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

The old version of me still throws everything into a writing or recording session, but in the past that’s exactly what I would have put out — there was no restraint. Now, I step away from the session and come back with that quote in mind, stripping back the production, takes, guitar layers, and textures until I feel we’ve hit the sweet spot of what’s needed, not what’s wanted.

Creating space and clarity within a song really helps the bigger picture and allows other elements to breathe or shine. The mood-led approach is about creating a feeling in the listener — whether that’s hope, nostalgia, sadness, happiness, or power. I love how just one added note or lead hook can take something from no hope to all hope. The production side of sculpting and building a song from lyrics and chords, adding texture and direction, is what excites me the most.

‘Ignite the Night’ introduces a nocturnal, cinematic world built on space and tension rather than genre revival. What images, moments, or emotions were you trying to capture when shaping the sound of the debut single?

The “big city” sound was key. After living in London for five years — or in any major capital city — there’s a certain romanticism to that fast-paced, bustling, illuminated life. When you’re deep in it, sometimes you only see a few feet ahead and don’t notice it. But when you step back, there’s a pulse, a throb, an electricity that runs through a city like that. Everyone’s on with something.

For me, it’s that moment when you clock off from work and you’re off the company dime — now it’s your time. You’re at the gates of the night. The sun’s going down and you’re descending into the nocturnal side of living: dinner, meeting friends, drinks, discovering new pockets of the city. That sense of togetherness that thrives after dark is the sound and emotion I wanted to capture.

You’ve spoken about focusing on songs that feel “lived-in” rather than loud. How does patience and restraint show up in your songwriting and production choices compared to your earlier work?

For me, “lived-in” means creating songs that feel new but familiar — led by texture, feeling, and emotion rather than a riff cranked up to eleven. I still love that approach, but it’s not what I want to create right now. I want songs that resonate, connect, and feel familiar while still being original.

From a production standpoint, I’ve limited myself to a more selective choice of plug-ins, pedals, and tools to encourage restraint and get more out of less. I find creativity can be stifled when there are too many options, and setting restrictions naturally raises creative output.

With my earlier work, I was enamoured by the sheer number of options — how many channels, how many plug-ins — but you have to live that phase to understand the value of patience and restraint. I’m still learning that balance.

With ‘Neon Churches’ following shortly after the debut, how do these first two releases set the tone for Thunder Motel — and what should listeners pay attention to as this world continues to unfold?

With Ignite the Night as the debut, I wanted something anthemic that immediately established the big city sound and planted a flag for the project. It’s a song about unity — coming together and standing together for a shared love — and I felt it was important to set that tone right from the start.

Neon Churches is a song of two halves. It starts as a slow burn with intimate, storytelling lyrics that follow the narrative of a night out and the moments that come with it. It’s written from the perspective that bars and nightclubs are our churches, DJs are the priests, and we’re their flock.

As the project unfolds, I’m aiming to build a body of work that creates a world where people can check in at the motel’s front desk. There’s a room for everyone — a place to plug in, tune out, and escape the background noise of life.

I want listeners to hear stories that resonate, textures and guitar lines that elevate, and moments that take them somewhere emotionally. Whether it’s a fist-pump moment or a sense of hope and release, I want people to leave feeling good — or at least a little better than when they first checked in.