If not for COVID, budding D.C. indie-rock band Night Hawk probably wouldn’t exist.
The band’s lead songwriters—vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Colter Adams and vocalist Peyton Semjen—met in 2020 while Semjen was noodling on a guitar outside her Bowdoin College apartment. Both first-year students at the Maine liberal arts school found themselves in the same exposure-limiting learning pod.
“It was really serendipitous who you ended up becoming friends with,” Semjen says.
Five years and a couple of side projects later, the two front the moody rock project that migrated to the District in 2024; violinist Emma Chun and drummer Eli Burckin round out the D.C. iteration of the band. Night Hawk will play Songbyrd on Aug. 21 as part of their current three-week tour from New England to Tennessee to celebrate the release of their new album. Before We Begin dropped Aug. 7 with 14 songs on restlessness, rejection, and the reluctance to embrace adulthood.
Adams and Semjen, both 23, immediately gelled as a songwriting duo, sometimes communicating more through musical ideas than conversation. “It’s an addicting feeling when you just feel like things are clicking,” Semjen says. “Every time we write something … it’s like everything is exactly how it was meant to be.”
While cranking out grunge in a ’90s cover band during their college years, the pair dreamed up a composition project using famed realist painter Edward Hopper as their muse. Night Hawk—an homage to Hopper’s iconic 1942 image of late-night patrons at a quiet diner—set out to “embody his world,” crafting songs and stories about the artist’s characters that emerge in their earliest singles and debut EP, Everything Good Ends. In 2024, the project landed them a backyard performance at the late artist’s childhood home in Nyack, New York, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The solitude in Hopper’s work resonated with the detachment Adams and Semjen experienced during the pandemic. “College wasn’t what we expected it to be,” Adams says. “Both of us felt pretty disconnected pretty immediately from something that we were both really excited about.”
Hopper still provides inspiration for the band, but the prevailing themes on their latest release are more personal, delving into the experiences and fears of young adults who aren’t quite sold on being grown-ups.
Post-graduation, both Adams and Semjen found day jobs in the District. Adams returned to his family home in Falls Church, but hopes to flee the nest for his own place in D.C. later this year. The transition—from home to college and back again—has been unsettling. “It felt like this weird—‘Am I an adult? Am I really fully responsible for my life? And do I have full ownership over what I want to do?’” he says. “More and more, the answer to that has become yes.”
D.C. is new terrain for Semjen, who until now has never lived outside of New England.
Since moving here, the Massachusetts native has proactively sought community, hosting jam sessions for fellow bands at her apartment. Making connections, she says, requires more intentionality than it did when moving through school hallways. “There’s a lot of hand-holding as you’re growing up, and a lot of just—you’re put in this room, and there’s people there,” she says.
Peyton Semjen, Emma Chun, Colter Adams, and Eli Burckin make up the D.C. lineup for Night Hawk. Credit: Alexandra Henriques.
A painter (she did the cover art for Before We Begin), potter, and musician, Semjen contends with bouts of anxiety and turns to creative outlets to keep the “late-night thoughts” at bay. “Unless I write them down or process them some way artistically … they kind of just nag at me,” she says.
The album’s title speaks to the inertia the songwriters felt as they approached the end of college and the uncertainty that would follow. “It’s this anticipatory, reflective, maybe resentful kind of feeling that you have right before you move on toward something new,” Semjen says.
Before We Begin is fragile and fretful at once, merging delicate melodies with lush, hard-driving soundscapes. Adams and Semjen sing tenderly together, their voices two petals from the same flower.
That synergy is at its best on “Mandy,” a song written for Semjen’s longtime friend. Clocking in under a minute, its sparse lyrics urge the listener to “fall back” and “give in” rather than struggle against life’s currents.
“[It’s] about taking ownership over your life and knowing that you have control,” Semjen says. “It’s yours—take it. … There’s not that much tension between you and everything else.”
On the album’s closer, “Something On My Mind,” the pair sings, “I’m restless and waiting for the end/ But you give up before we begin.” It’s a song about standing “on the precipice” of a new chapter, says Adams, who likens the feeling to an ouroboros, an ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its tail. “[It’s like] I’m ready for a change, but I’m not ready for a change, simultaneously.”