Los Angeles, CA – Feb 2, 2025 – Nick van der Kolk and Daylight bring listeners Love + Radio: Blood Memory, a searing 10-part documentary series from the legendary audio pioneer Love + Radio.
Blood Memory shatters the conventions of the true crime genre, presenting a non-narrative, long-form investigation — a rare feat in the category. The series follows the life of Michael Thompson, who became infamous for defecting from a notorious prison gang and testifying against them in several high-profile criminal trials.
This is not a podcast that tells you what happened; it invites you into an immersive, ethically complex world that feels like Sons of Anarchy meets S-Town. Through nearly a decade of intimate interviews with Thompson, combined with meticulous investigative journalism, the series forces listeners to grapple with a central, unnerving question: Is Michael Thompson a gentle soul trapped by a broken system, or is he, as critics claim, a master manipulator who cannot be trusted?
“Few true crime podcasts have ever attempted a format like this. By resisting the tidy narrative structure, ‘Blood Memory’ delivers a raw, unnerving story that is a definitive game-changer for the genre. We are proud to partner with one of the oldest and most enduring narrative podcasts, and to support quality storytelling.” — Steve Wilson, Chief Strategy Officer, Daylight Media .
Enhancing the series’ singular atmosphere is an international score from the experimental catalogues of También from Ecuador, Sheffield-based Audiobulb Records, the venerable Brooklyn label RVNG [Revenge], and the works of Dutch composer Michel Banabila, plus haunting American and Irish gothic folk from Timber Timbre, Landless, Rún, and more.
Created by critically-acclaimed radio producer Nick van der Kolk, Love + Radio: Blood Memory represents his first deep-dive foray into investigative true crime. Van der Kolk and his team dug up thousands of court documents and found new sources to tell the whole, deliciously complicated story.
“The podcast is now a mature, mainstream type of media, and yet, it remains the most exciting, brimming with creative potential. It is able to cut through reactive social media consumption and invite audiences to broaden their understanding of wildly different human experiences, with both empathy and skepticism.” — Nick van der Kolk
The series premiered as an Official Selection at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, where it was awarded ‘Best Independent Non-Fiction Podcast.’
The first episode of Love + Radio: Blood Memory will be available on all major podcast platforms on Tuesday, February 2. Subscribe to Love + Radio to binge all episodes of the full series on January 26. Daylight will oversee ad sales and distribution for the podcast.
ABOUT LOVE + RADIO Heralded by The Guardian as “one of the greatest podcasts of all time,” Nick van der Kolk’s Love + Radio has won multiple awards, including the Gold prize at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in 2011, the first podcast ever to do so. Love + Radio’s CBC series, Thrill Seekers, was named one of the Best Podcasts of 2024 by Amazon Music. The Love + Radio episode The Living Room was the basis of the short film The Neighbor’s Window, which won an Academy Award in 2020. Love + Radio celebrated its 20th anniversary in October, making it one of the longest running narrative podcasts in all of history.
ABOUT DAYLIGHT MEDIA Daylight, a new venture from the team at QCODE, is designed for creators to scale reach and monetization across audio, video and emerging platforms. Daylight provides creators with a full suite of services, including distribution, IP expansion, audience development and marketing, as well as technology and product solutions. Daylight services a wide range of genres, including some of the biggest emerging video podcasts and award-winning series such as Love and Radio, The Shawn Ryan Show, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, The Chris Cuomo Project, And That’s Why We Drink, Jillian on Love, and You Should Know, among others.
