The Regrettes fuse elements of vintage punk and retro new wave with increasingly polished radio-friendly textures, all executed with sharp intelligence and energy. Frontwoman Lydia Night was still a teenager when the group issued its first album, Feel Your Feelings Fool!, in 2017. Although the release captured youthful exuberance, it also revealed a compositional sophistication that the quartet refined on its 2019 follow-up, How Do You Love?. A run of singles issued in 2020 and 2021 signaled the band’s shift away from punk and new wave roots toward bright, contemporary pop, a direction fully realized on Further Joy, which appeared in 2022.
Lydia Night assembled the Regrettes in 2015 alongside guitarist Genessa Gariano, bassist Sage Nicole, and drummer Maxx Morando. Night had begun writing songs and playing guitar at age six, absorbing influence from the classic rock and punk records that filled her home. At roughly twelve she joined Los Angeles’ School of Rock, where she met Gariano and Nicole, though the Regrettes did not coalesce until late 2015. By then Night had accumulated enough original material to secure a deal with Warner Bros. “A Living Human Girl” surfaced in summer 2016, joined later that year by “Hey Now” and “Hot,” all advance tracks for the full-length Feel Your Feelings Fool!, which Warner released in early 2017.
In early 2018 the Regrettes delivered the EP Attention Seeker. Around the same period Nicole and Morando departed, with Brooke Dickson and Drew Thomsen stepping in. Several singles arrived that year, among them “California Friends” and “Poor Boy,” followed in 2019 by a cover of Queen’s “Don't Stop Me Now.” Throughout the first half of that year the band previewed its sophomore album with “Pumpkin,” “Dress Up,” and “I Dare You.” Produced by Mike Elizondo, How Do You Love? reached stores via Warner in August. Two more singles appeared in 2020—“What Am I Gonna Do Today” and “I Love Us”—before the group lent support to Lauran Hibberd’s 2021 track “How Am I Still Alive?” Late that year the Regrettes resurfaced with the new-wave-tinged “Monday.” Crafted during a ten-day Joshua Tree retreat and captured in both in-person and remote sessions overseen by Jacknife Lee and Tim Pagnotta, “Monday” initiated a series of digital singles spread across two years that culminated in Further Joy’s April 2022 arrival, an album on which the band exchanged its retro-punk approach for a more mainstream pop sound. The Regrettes performed their last concert in December 2023 before parting ways to pursue separate endeavors.
