The Midnight |18+

Don’t say The Midnight didn’t warn you. After teasing fans on social media with ominous imagery, snippets of lush keyboard washes, and cryptic references to classic science fiction stories, the band that emerged over a decade ago out of Los Angeles returns with Syndicate, their fifth studio album (not even counting the three EPs released between) and their most ambitious and outward-looking work yet. Syndicate evolves The Midnight’s simultaneously retro and forward-looking sound while cementing the band’s status as perhaps the most musically and lyrically ambitious act to come out of the burgeoning synthwave scene.

With four singles already released from the 17-track album (“Shadowverse,” “Digital Dreams,” “Chariot,” and “Love is an Ocean,”) the listener can already get a sense of the wider canvas the band is painting with. “This is our ‘making peace with the apocalypse’ record,” says singer and lyricist Tyler Lyle.

And while Syndicate’s lyrics embrace the unsettled, sometimes paranoid side of the 1980s (few reminisces of the period focus on how preoccupied by nuclear war the eighties were) Lyle’s creative partner Tim McEwan brings undertones of anxiety and even doom to the lush synth washes and hooky yet unexpected chord progressions that fans of The Midnight have come to know and love.

The band was born in spring 2012 from the fortuitous meeting of two very different musical sensibilities. Atlanta-born Lyle emerged from the folk-inflected Georgia music scene that grew up around the legendary Eddie’s Attic live music venue. “I came to LA thinking I was gonna be the next Mumford and Sons,” Lyle laughs, recalling how he was put together with Danish songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tim McEwan in what he calls “a songwriters’ blind date.”