Staying Up Late with Born at Midnite

The Montreal disco-pop duo offer a glimpse into the cute little monsters inside the machine.

Published on June 1, 2026

by Madeline Lines

Photos by Loicia Samson, Graphics by Erik Grice

I’m ascending to the heavens with Born at Midnite’s Amery Sandford — one half of the ultra-chiller duo Born at Midnite and Montreal illustrator extraordinaire. We’re in a tiny elevator engulfed in a sherbet-coloured sunset that’s been hand-painted on all four sides, though not by her. She tells me the first time she found herself in here, she nearly lost her mind at the sight of it — she was high, it was Halloween, and it sounded like the beginning of a cartoon.

Now we’re sailing through fake clouds toward her top-floor Mile-Ex studio to fuck around, find out, and call her musical (and actual) soulmate David Carriere. In an era where indie music feels so self-serious, Born at Midnite are only serious about having a good time. They’ve accidentally summoned a strange little musical universe out of inside jokes, late night impulses, and whatever feels good in the moment.

Sandford and Carriere are both “serious” artists, at least by conventional standards. Sandford’s iconic characters are plastered across Montreal — bouncing off greeting cards in boutiques on St-Laurent Boulevard, decorating posters for local shows, and peeking out from gallery walls around the city. Carriere, meanwhile, is currently on tour with TOPS, the beloved Montreal indie band that’s “made it.”

But what does “making it” actually mean? That’s something Born at Midnite seem thoroughly uninterested in defining.

The project is pure, unadulterated fun, born from an ethos of mischief and play. It’s an almost religiously unserious project, the seed of which started when Sandford and Carriere first met. She’d stay over at his house drunkenly playing drums until four in the morning while the two of them accidentally fell in love in the process — cue the Shrek 2 soundtrack.

“I remember David had a Lord Farquaad haircut,” Sandford laughs. “But he rocked it.”

“I was watching her sing,” says Carriere, recalling Sandford’s earlier project BBQT. “And I was like, she’s awesome. And cool. And cute. And bad-ass.”

Ten years later, and dating a fan seems to have worked out. But their project Born at Midnite was really only born in 2020 (exact birth time unknown, contrary to the title), when they began making something of the musical messings-around that had come to define their relationship to each other.

“It’s my favourite thing to do because we’re not trying to put a giant thing together,” says Carriere. “It is just exactly what it sounds like when the two of us make music.”

This unforced, unfazed essence is what makes every track off their upcoming debut album, Eternal BAM Nation, sparkle. The sound materializes intuitively, samples pulled together like an audio moodboard punctuated by Sandford’s poppy exclamations or Carriere’s Ween-ish timbre. Songs feel less “written” than discovered, like two people stumbling into ideas faster than they can second-guess them. The album is not concerned with sounding consistent, or profound, but a cheeky humour is a near-constant byproduct.

“The element of surprise is always something we’re letting happen,” says Sandford. “We’re often putting a sound in an unexpected place.”

On one track, the sound of the Montreal métro rings out like a dog whistle. Elsewhere, the duo recruit Carriere’s older brother — from the Nickelback-esque hard rock band Royal Tusk — to cartoonishly growl “ROCK ON! rrrROCK-ROCK ON!” over a track before a voice launches into a rendition of Avril Lavigne’s infamous “rock chick” interview.

“We obviously didn’t want to pay for that sample, so we got our friend Gabby from Shunk to learn it,” laughs Sandford. “And she actually learned it theatrically. She’s an opera kid. All the intonations were spot on.”

The greater BaM cast of characters doesn’t just include friends and family, but some little illustrated gremlins too. Plastered across the walls of Sandford’s studio are scribbled devilish angels and anime-style sketches of the pair themselves: Carriere with his permanently furrowed brow, Sandford with her diamond-shaped eyes sparkling mischievously back at you. Storyboards for their music videos starring the little guys flutter in the wind.

Many of the tiny creatures that populate Born at Midnite’s universe — from their album artwork to the music videos — begin as loose hand sketches before migrating onto Sandford’s iPad, where she uses custom brushes she designed herself to recreate the tactile imperfections of old punk flyers, riso prints, and screen-printed posters.

Despite working digitally, she still thinks like a printmaker first. Trained originally in screen printing, Sandford approaches nearly every drawing as though it will eventually exist in the physical world — whether on a poster taped to a venue wall, an album cover, or a sticker slapped onto the side of her AirPods Max 2s. The result is artwork that feels simultaneously nostalgic and immediate: messy in all the right ways, but intentional underneath the chaos.

Their distinct visual signature helps to conjure the illusion that they are two little monsters in the machine, mashing buttons that say things like “I’m so fucking back.” The duo’s built a world where it’s always nighttime and something is afoot, but it’s never anything actually that evil. The opening track “12 Bells & A Baby Crying” casts a Halloweentown spell over the album.

They’re not quite sure where that vibe came from, but digging deeper reveals one formative memory Sandford can trace it back to: sitting in front of the TV at 10 years old listening to the Y2K “virtual” Canadian pop duo Prozzäk while watching Gremlins. In hindsight, it feels less like an influence and more like a prophecy. That’s the moment BaM was born, like a little green guy bouncing off the walls from fried chicken after midnight.

“I had a bit of a freakout on Monday morning,” Sandford laughs. “I was showing my studiomate the video causing it, and she was like, it’s so funny because you were so stressed out, and I look over and you’re hunched over little guys with bouncing guitars and people dancing and rocking out.”

It’s in moments like these that Carriere helps keep things trucking. He admits he is really good at helping people finish things, a skill most often used to push other peoples’ work across the finish line. Between the two of them, it helps them gingerly jumpstart a song if they’ve hit a dead end.

“I think David is really good at dispelling the cloud of negativity that can happen when you think of a new idea and then you’re like, ‘what if this sucks?’” says Sandford.

Sometimes, though, things come together so quickly there’s barely time to question them at all. You can hear that lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry all over “I Haven’t Forgotten You,” one of the album’s instant earworms. Sandford guesses the song came together in less than 10 minutes after Carriere sent her a beat built around a sped-up Judie Tzuke sample.

“If we’re like, this makes me feel some kind of way – let’s go,” says Carriere. “Otherwise, it’s like, let’s go… get a cookie.”

For Born at Midnite, the magic seems to happen somewhere between the joke and the impulse, before overthinking or preciousness makes music-making a drag. The result is a band that feels less manufactured and more like a raw slice of life you stumbled upon, like walking past the window of two people laughing on a hot summer night.