English rock icons the Cult have shared a new song today from their forthcoming album, Under The Midnight Sun, scheduled to release on October 7. A knockout followup to the debut single, “Give Me Mercy,” the band’s latest single leaves little to the imagination. Check it out below:
The concept of Under the Midnight Sun was conceived in Finland when frontman Ian Astbury noticed how the sun kept lingering in the sky well past the evening. While absorbing the whimsical sight on the grounds of the Provinssirock festival, he began thinking about the “midnight sun” and eventually imbued it into the group’s next album.
“It’s three in the morning, the sun’s up, and there’s all these beautiful people in this halcyon moment,” Astbury recalls. “People are laying on the grass, making out, drinking, smoking. There were rows of flowers at the front of the stage from the performances earlier that evening. It was an incredible moment.”
The new album was recorded after the coronavirus lockdown was lifted and the band could work together in the studio once again. They had Tom Dalgety (Pixies, Ghost, Royal Blood) produce the tracks and Astbury couldn’t be happier about their decision to do so: “I was compelled by this vision, this anomaly, this memory, of being under the midnight sun. Tom helped us bring a new musical shape and frequency to our process.”
Astbury hopes that listeners connect with the new album at a deep level. “At the core of it all, music contains the vibrational frequency of how we once communicated before we could even speak,” he explained. “Bird songs, animal calls, string theory, quantum physics, psychedelics. The record ultimately is about finding and uniting beauty in those strangely natural moments.”
Photo Credit: Alyssa Fried