BAND FEATURESFEATURESHARD ROCK

Photo Credit: Linda Florin


THE NIGHT FLIGHT ORCHESTRA have captured the hearts and imaginations of the rock and metal world with their infectious, nostalgic soundscape. After a meteoric rise the future of the band became uncertain in 2022 when the unfortunate news broke of the tragic passing of guitarist David Andersson. After a lot of deliberation frontman, bandmate and long time friend Björn Strid opted to keep the band going and honour David‘s legacy.



“We’ve gone through quite a lot with this band. It’s been quite the journey. We’ve never put so much work into one album before and when we came out of the other side it became a celebration of our resilience and remembering the good times with David. It seemed like an impossible task and we had to dig really deep so this album is almost like ‘now give us the moon will ya?’.”

Whilst Give Us The Moon may be the opening of a new chapter for the band, David‘s presence can still be found. “Like The Beating Of A Heart was a composition that David wrote some years ago which was originally meant for a different project that me and him were going to start called Phantom Messenger which sadly never happened,” explains Björn. “There was something about this song that felt too good to just leave sitting in the vault. We thought about trying it out for THE NIGHT FLIGHT ORCHESTRA and we got the blessing from David‘s family and it turned out great. We wanted a little piece of David on there and it definitely fits in with the other songs on the album. The rest of the material is brand new as after everything that happened we wanted to also make sure we stood on our own two feet. David was still very present throughout the whole process, guiding us and helping us to carry on his legacy. Myself and Sebastian wrote the majority of the material with our new guitarist Rasmus also contributing. We feel that we managed to tap into David‘s world and bring forward everything that made him special as well as broadening our palette along the way.”

As most readers will be aware, Björn is also the frontman of iconic melodic death metal band SOILWORK, a band which is considerably different to the care-free, colourful stylings of THE NIGHT FLIGHT ORCHESTRA. This endeavour allows him to be able to operate in the best of both worlds and express his creative freedom.


“We really aim to create music that feels timeless and generates a lot of images in your head, almost like a soundtrack to life. That is always our guiding star, to feel like you’re in motion when you hear our melodies and romanticise travelling, even though at times it may not feel so glamorous for a musician! We want people to escape and enter a different dimension and come along for the journey with us. This new album also contains a lot of real life stories as well. I’ve always been a big fan of melody, ever since I was a kid. It’s more of a driving force for me than the lyrics. It’s my go to for channelling emotion. Being able to write music with THE NIGHT FLIGHT ORCHESTRA is very freeing, I’ve been in the world of metal since the 90s and metal can feel quite contained and caged whereas the mentality with NIGHT FLIGHT is so open and you feel like you can do whatever you want which is such an exciting feeling.”

Juggling the responsibilities that come with being part of two hugely successful bands can be a bit of a perilous balancing act, an undertaking which Björn is thankfully managing to navigate. “It’s been pretty tough, before COVID we seemed to have everything arranged into cycles but when everything opened up again we needed both bands to get back out there and make up for lost time. There has even been times where I’ve played with both bands at the same festival! It took a while to get back into the rhythm again. This year will be mostly focusing on THE NIGHT FLIGHT ORCHESTRA with a view to getting a new SOILWORK release out next year. I have to pick my battles these days and be a bit more selective with touring rather than doing full scale European tours and heading to America straight after. The opportunity to rest can be very hard to find!”

What started as a bit of a passion project with a close friend blossomed into a new and exciting adventure, Björn can’t quite believe his luck. “At first it was just something we felt we really needed to get out of our system but me and David found ourselves bonding over the music we were creating and we wanted to continue this new route of musical expression. We felt like we had something quite special and it quickly became a band rather than just a project. After we released Amber Galactic things really started to take off. We felt like we wanted to share it with the world and it’s crazy that in 2025 we’ve been to South America, Australia, we opened for KISS on one of their final shows. It’s been mindblowing. We take a lot of pride in our live show and we try to hand-pick songs that really set the mood and take the crowd on a journey!”

Give Us The Moon is out now via Napalm Records.

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