When The Regrettes play the Toulouse Theatre on Tuesday, March 15, it’ll be something of a full-circle moment for Lydia Night. The singer and guitarist was born in New Orleans, and her father, Morgan Higby Night, owned the Shim Sham, the early-aughts venue at 615 Toulouse St. that preceded One Eyed Jacks and now the Toulouse Theatre.
Lydia Night was really young when her dad was booking punk bands, local rock groups and burlesque (check out writer Alison Fensterstock's remembrance of the club here), but she still has some slight memories of the Shim Sham stage.
“It may be triggered just by seeing videos of it, but I used to get up on stage, I remember, and before bands [I] would sort of soundcheck,” Night says. “I was obsessed with the Ramones when I was little, and so I remember standing on the stage and singing ‘Beat on the Brat.’”
Shim Sham closed at 6 a.m. on June 6, 2003, and soon after Night and her family moved to southern California. She started The Regrettes with guitarist Genessa Gariano in 2015, and the band now includes bassist Brooke Dickson and drummer Drew Thomsen.
Tuesday also will be The Regrettes’ first time to play New Orleans as a band. Kississippi opens the show at 8 p.m.
The Regrettes are currently on tour in run-up to their third full-length album, “Further Joy,” out April 8. The band started working on the album right around the time the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and the early lockdowns shaped the record, Night says.
“I started doing some Zoom songwriting with other songwriters or producers to just get inspired when I became sick of my own writing,” Night says. “Then as a band, once it was safer, we all got tested and went to Joshua Tree for 10 days and wrote a lot in a house. That was awesome, not only because we wrote a couple of songs for the album, but we just got to talk about what this album meant on a larger scale to us, and visuals and the fashion we wanted to bring — every sort of element on how we wanted to present this album to the world.”
The Los Angeles-based group’s well-received first two albums, “Feel Your Feelings Fool!” and “How Do You Love?” are built on punk, garage rock and riot grrrl influences. “Further Joy” sounds like the next step for the band and finds The Regrettes experimenting and digging into pop territory.
“We just knew that if we made a pop album, or a pop-alternative album, that the most important thing was to come at it with confidence and to not second guess anything we were doing,” Night says.
Night, who is now 21, started her first band when she was 7 years old and has been touring since she was 12. When the pandemic unplugged venues around the country and pulled bands off stages, it was a rare — and at first uncomfortable — break for Night. “I felt a huge part of my identity and ego being stripped away because of not touring,” she said in the past.
But the break also gave the band members time to get to know one another in new ways, outside of the familiar gigging life, Night told Gambit. And she was able to reflect and work on her mental health.
A lot of that work is seen in “Further Joy.” Night created a pink-hued persona named Joy for the album, and she made her debut in the music video for the song “Monday” trying to degrade a young Night prepping for a school dance and fill her with self-doubt.
“Joy is sort of like my alter ego,” Night says. “It’s this false identity of perfection. It’s this false perfect being that is something that is unachievable, and I will never actually have a pink body. It’s there to show how ridiculous all of these false expectations are that I set up for myself and I think a lot of people set up for themselves.”
Tickets are $20-$35 at toulousetheatre.com. Find more about the band at theregrettes.com.
Remember to grab your face mask and vaxx card.