Strokes Bassist Nikolai Fraiture Shines in Summer Moon

Like his bandmate Nick Valensi — who recently released an album by his side project CRX — the Strokes’ bassist Nikolai Fraiture has done a lot of his own writing over the past couple years. And now he too has a band and a record to show for it.

Summer Moon’s debut With You Tonight is a spirited alt-rock album fueled by quirky arrangements and funky progressions; it’s influenced by early ’80s Italo-disco combined with steady beats and simple vocal melodies. Groove is paramount, and many of the songs retain the same rhythm and tempo of Krautrock bands such as Can and Neu! At the same time, the pulsing tracks are colored with keyboard surges, vocoder flourishes, and sound effects that keep the music from sounding monotonous.

“Writing these songs was my way of getting away from what I do in the Strokes,” Fraiture tells Yahoo Music. “I wanted to explore my own personal space in my head by mixing analog and digital sounds with synthesizer, and see where that could take me. When I started out, I didn’t know if it would even work, but I think it came out even better than I thought it would.”

Unlike Valensi, who recorded CRX’s album New Skin with relatively unknown players, Summer Moon put together a Los Angeles indie supergroup to record With You Tonight. The band features Fraiture on bass and lead vocals, former Airborne Toxic Event bassist Noah Harmon on guitar, Uh Huh Her’s Camila Grey on keyboards and vocals, and Jane’s Addiction’s Stephen Perkins on drums.

While Fraiture says the band’s chemistry is so good it feels like they’ve been playing together for years, the project had a humble beginning. In late 2014, Fraiture had some ideas for the second album from his solo project Nickel Eye, so he holed up in his New York home studio and started writing. He recruited Au Revoir Simone keyboardist Erika Spring, the Like drummer Tennessee Thomas, and multi-instrumentalist Lewis Lazar, and then arranged a batch of songs. In 2015, the band performed several shows and posted the tracks “With You Tonight” and “Happenin’” online.

Fraiture liked the recordings, but he was having trouble getting everyone in one place at one time, so he decided to leave New York and work on the album in Los Angeles with different musicians.

“A friend of mine is a manager in L.A., so I gave him a wish list, and he got in touch with different people,” Fraiture says. “Stephen Perkins was one of my top picks because he’s such a versatile player, and he responded right away. And Noah and Camila were on hiatus from their main bands, so they were available. Everyone liked the vibe of the music, so we did some rehearsals and they went great, so we just continued from there.”

With the new lineup in place, Summer Moon fine-tuned the songs, Fraiture encouraging his new bandmates to add personal touches to the music. “I think we wound up with some of the tonal explorations of Sonic Youth in there as well as some ’90s hip-hop,” he says. “My big thing was creating music that sounded like it used samples, but have those parts actually played by musicians. So it sounds like there are samples in there when there aren’t. That’s exciting to me because it’s a challenge, and it kept us from falling into an easy, familiar mold.”

The greatest challenge for Fraiture, however, was stepping behind the mic. He had sang lead vocals for Nickel Eye, so he knew he could deliver. However, playing funk bass lines onstage while delivering fairly straightforward vocal parts required lots of practice. At times it was frustrating, but gradually he mastered the technique.

“They’re very different beasts, and to try to tame them at the same time is very challenging,” he says. “But it was just another new thing I wanted to learn to do. It’s always a little bit scary whenever you put yourself out there like that and try something. There’s that element where you’re making yourself vulnerable and there’s the sense of the unknown. But that’s also what makes it exciting.”

Having his main band anchored in New York and his side project based in Los Angeles means Fraiture frequently has to travel between the East and West Coast, even when he’s not on tour. If that’s what it takes to get the right players together under the right circumstances, it’s a small price to pay — especially since he enjoys living in both locations.

“Right now, it’s actually a lot easier being a band in L.A.,” he says. “The vibe is a lot more relaxed and laid back. And everybody knows what they’re doing and wants to play together, so it’s really fun. But being back in New York is good, too, because it’s very hectic and crazy and that’s exhilarating. So switching between the two gives me the perfect balance and keeps everything super-exciting.”