The Midnight’s new album, Syndicate, arrives at a noteworthy time for the band Atlanta, Georgia- and Greater Portland, Oregon-based group. They’re bigger than ever, with a talented and sizable live band that headlines well-populated venues across the globe, plays big festivals, and builds an ever-expanding tent for synthwave. After two albums on Ninja Tune’s Counter Records, Tim McEwan’s and Tyler Lyle’s project is now on Sony’s Ultra Records. This is a label that has had everyone from The Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, and The Crystal Method to Sofi Tukker and Icona Pop on its roster, with Calvin Harris and Deadmau5 somewhere in the mix, too.
A global fan base follows them ferociously, hanging on every word, note, and video clip for clues to bigger and more meaningful insights about the band’s work. McEwan’s decision in recent years to stop touring with the band and focus on making new music triggered a fervor of forensic investigation and deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning that make Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and the CIA seem like amateurs.
In some circles on this rock, The Midnight are a tentpole, rock-star act as big as anything dominating a Billboard chart (and they’re certainly far better songwriters than certain folks who populate the charts). Where do you go when this is your life? Do you reject it and release an album that tears it all apart, like a Buddhist monk destroying a meticulously designed mandala to demonstrate impermanence? Or do you double-down on the same ol’ and just keep pumping out the tried-and-true variations of the same songs set forth over several years of releases?
In the case of Syndicate, the album seems to represent McEwan, Lyle, and collaborators codifying the darker and increasingly more modern artistic themes and habits they’ve been perfecting since the late 2010s. To be sure, their work on this new album holds on dearly to some of the 1980s or retro nostalgia that’s always colored their compositions, but this is pretty clearly a release much more interested in the electronic and pop music of now and the future. Erecting a bigger tent involves relaxing some of the strictures of niche-genre world-building, after all. (Given that The Midnight have indeed been releasing music for more than a decade, perhaps the “retro” is at this point more nostalgia for the band’s own sonic world-making, than any particular band or song from the past.)
With all of that in mind, the sonically ecstatic, emotionally upbeat sounds of some songs in the Kids-Monsters-Heroes trilogy carry far less influence here. Instead, the 85-minute Syndicate recalls much of the catchy darkness of 2017’s Nocturnal and the Ultra-sound of select cuts like “Fire in the Sky” from 2020’s Monsters. It’s in this fusion that we find true gems.
“Shadowverse” kicks off with a giant splash-and-slash of jagged synths, before settling into a beautifully unsettling pop song that, in true Lyle fashion, with different music could be a nighttime-ready outlaw country song. This is hands-down one of my favorite The Midnight songs. I haven’t stopped listening to it since I first hear it a few months ago.
Paired next to the previous cut on the tracklist is popular single “Runaways,” featuring the supremely talented Bonnie McKee in a duet role with Lyle. McKee’s alternating staccato- and legato-delivery over the hard-charging sonics infuses the song with new-love immediacy that Justin Klunk’s and Thomas Edinger’s blistering saxophone solos effortlessly complement. The up-tempo “Friction,” with Royce Whittaker’s searing guitar solo, completes the trifecta on this section of the setlist.
Elsewhere, we get the more fast-paced, EDM-infused sentiment of “Chariot,” an early album single (written with Matt Baum of Watch Out For Snakes) that gave us a peek at what Tim and Tyler might have in mind for the coming years. The manipulated vocal hooks and musical drop have a magnetism that will stick to you long after the song finishes.
Whittaker and partner-in-all-things Lelia Broussard, both longtime McEwan-Lyle collaborators and live members of The Midnight, show up as their Jupiter Winter moniker on “Fatal Obsession,” a beautifully ominous cut that offers the darker outcome of “Runaways.” What if we GTFO and end up learning we just fucking awful for each other? (Been there.) This catchy cut features a deftly implemented sample of Sunglasses Kid’s “Undercurrent.”
Perhaps the most surprising song on the album is the instrumental collaboration with Carpenter Brut (aka French musician Franck Hueso). The king of darksynth paired with the other biggest synthwave project yields a fruitful partnership ripe for repeat listens. The emotional structure of the song is inherently McEwan, but dominating throughout are the face-melting synths of Brut. A full album of this would be mind blowing.
The sections of the album that do cling to the more upbeat, colorful sounds of the band resonate more powerfully in contrast to the darker, minor-key majority. For example, there is the kosmische-arpped “Quiet Earth,” a mostly instrumental track that makes me think of Air’s “Alone in Kyoto” if Tangerine Dream covered it — until it gives way to McEwan’s robotic-tinged pipes slinging poetry. It’s almost six minutes long, but it goes by so fast because it’s such a beautiful and engaging track.
“Sanctuary” is a piano-driven number that feels like a fraternal sibling to “Quiet Earth.” I fully expect it to be the least listened-to cut on the album, but I hope that’s not the case. The first half is a staggeringly gorgeous instrumental composition that could serve as a perfect score cue for some massive display of cinema, perhaps a Terrence Malick film. The second half, with Daft Punk levels of vocoding, has the club-ready DNA of a cue from a modern Tron property.
Skip on over to “The Right Way,” a song much more at home on Kids or Heroes than Syndicate. Those upbeat colors I referred to earlier are all over this one. Lyle’s vibrant imagery and bittersweet love themes abound over McEwan’s wistful but still joyful musicality. The song represents all the hallmarks of a feel-good number from the band. It’s one of their best songs and it doesn’t belong on this album. (I get why it’s on the album, though, which I’ll address later.)
Speaking of robots, the crunch-brushed “Digital Dreams” feels lyrically like the transhumanistic sequel to 2019’s “America Online.” Although musically it fits firmly within the Syndicate framework, Lyle’s words could be interpreted as something like this: Whereas “Online” felt like a clarion call for late-night dialup dwellers to remember our shared humanity, “Dreams” seems to represent a corrupted end to that story in which we in some ways have become more machine than human and are sorting through what that means (and what we’ve lost). We’re all one beating, AI-driven heart with our dreams trapped in water-guzzling data centers that pump out data that challenges our sense of reality.
Ultimately, Syndicate feels like the band’s first major-label release, but I don’t mean this pejoratively. Instead, if you look at how so many strains of the band’s past and future are represented the record comes off more like a way to showcase The Midnight’s depth and breadth of talent to a bigger audience. In true McEwan-Lyle fashion, they put everything into their art and so they still they ended up creating one of their best albums. I find this to be quite a rewarding confluence of events for all involved.
You can stream Syndicate pretty much everywhere, and you can buy it in various physical forms from the band’s store. (Notably, Sony isn’t allowing the album to be on Bandcamp, which is a disappointing departure for a band that’s been on BC for many years.)
They’re also on tour in fair Europa and India now and over in this part of the world this spring. DO go see them live. They are FANTASTIC and the crowd energy is unreal.
