The Midnight: My Story

The Midnight Wiki is celebrating 10 years of The Midnight in July 2024 and we want to share YOUR The Midnight stories. To see your story featured here, reach out to us on Twitter or email us at hello@themidnight.wiki. Pictures and videos are encouraged with your submissions!

Chalupa Blackout

My Midnight story started with a nighttime road trip home. I was at the wheel with my brother riding shotgun, and he wanted to play his nighttime driving playlist. He played Jason, Sunset, Vampires, and Days of Thunder.

After a few more nighttime drives and listening to this playlist, I started to dig it. Then I started to do a little more digging myself and listened to a few other songs and I was hooked. Brooklyn, Monsters, America 2, and Los Angeles were added to my Liked Songs on Spotify there after.

In October 2021, I was listening to a Midnight song on YouTube, then I saw that they were playing a show in Toronto, where I’m from, in March 2022. And it was on a Saturday night too! I went ahead and bought tickets to that show for my brother and I.

At the time of the show, I had also got a few other friends hooked on The Midnight, and they joined my brother and I at the show. There, I met two fellow Midnight Discordians. I had the absolute time of my life at that show! I’m belting out lyrics, jumping up and down like a kid hyped up on sugar, you name it!

The one moment I will always take away was when the other two Discordians and I were screaming FIRE during the chorus of CYHOD. At the time, it was not released and they were introducing it as a new song, but we knew about it because we had bought tickets to their LA show that they broadcasted online. We got a smile from Lelia after the first chorus, and took it as acknowledgement. My friend later told me that people around us were looking at us kind of weird whenever the chorus would hit, and we’d belt out FIRE.

Since then, I’ve gone to see them in Seattle, and Buffalo, where I’ve met up with other Midnight Discordians. I will be going to the upcoming show they have in Toronto, with Chromeo, in October.

Magi

First heard of them thanks to a tweet from Chris Evans during the pandemic. The Nocturnal album gave me peace in a time of so much fear and uncertainty! Fast forward a year and I got into a battle with cancer, “The Comeback Kid” hit different after that🩵 When I finished Chemo, my brother used these lyrics from “Sunset” to celebrate:

“They say it’s darkest before the dawn
We’ve been in this town for far too long
They say it’s darkest before the dawn
We’re moving on, we’re moving on, we’re moving on”🥹

I had to miss two of their tour stops in ATL cause of chemo but when Tyler did a solo set at a records store in ATL, I had the privilege of going and got to meet him. Then I finally got to see them in Raleigh last year. Best concert ever🥹 Sorry for such a long post, but The Midnight means so much to me and have gotten me through the darkest times of my life.🩵 Forever grateful for a random tweet from Captain America that changed my life.🩵🩵🩵

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Mathew W

Instead of just sitting back and liking something for what it is and enjoying it, I've been on a quest for the last couple of months trying to dissect just why my two favourite music artists in the world have been able to capture me the way that they have. Those two, as the title of this entry indicates, are The Midnight and Tyler Lyle. For those of you who have been thus far spared from my simply horrible wrath that is sharing their music with you, The Midnight is a synthwave duo comprised of a world-class, amazingly talented producer from Denmark, Tim McEwan, and an absolutely superb vocalist, lyricist and folk musician from the deep south of the U.S. - Tyler Lyle.

But first, an overly detailed backstory. Because I'm overly nostalgic, and chances are if you’re reading this, you are too.

I was introduced to The Midnight by a streamer who I've now watched for ten years, UberHaxorNova, when he had their song "Kick Drums and Red Wine" playing on his stream sometime in early 2018, in what was a very transitional period of my life. I heard it and immediately grabbed my iPhone and used Siri to identify what the song was because it was that damn good. I had been a fan of synthwave without specifically knowing what the genre was for at least a year or two at this point, but this discovery swung the saloon doors right open.

Over the next few months, I very slowly started progressing through their existing discography, and it slowly solidified within my brain that they were among my favourite musical artists that I had, especially when their new album "Kids" was released in summer 2018. After listening some more, by February/March of 2020, they were probably my favourite band, but it wasn't necessarily set in stone by that point. Then, on May 6, 2020, The Midnight released "Deep Blue". There are only a handful of songs that I wish with my entire being I could listen to for the first time all over again. Deep Blue is at the top of whatever that list is.

I had been aware that the song was being released on YouTube early in the morning. A few days beforehand, The Midnight released a small teaser of the song on Twitter and I was... disappointed. I specifically, very vividly remember thinking at the time "oh I don't really like this" - the teaser lacked any "oomph", for lack of a better word. Nevertheless, the first thing I did when I woke up on May 6 was open it up on my computer and throw my headphones in. Instantaneously, the song was not what I was expecting. The teaser was this calm, almost melodramatic snippet that I wasn't very excited for. This kicked like a shot of bull testosterone directly into the fucking vein. The song progressed. Smile growing larger, goosebumps forming on my arms and a shiver sent down my spine. Then Tyler's powerful vocals take over and overwhelmed - beat growing, background synths growing more aggressive by the second. Then the sax hit.

Perfection.

Tyler's unbelievable vocals from start to finish, the perfect mixing on the track - in my eyes, Deep Blue is a perfect song. If they weren't already definitively my favourite band before, this experience solidified it from that very moment until the heat death of the universe in solid fucking platinum.

Now, to backtrack a bit. Pretty early on in my fandom, I discovered a bit of Tyler's solo stuff and simply decided it wasn't for me without a second thought. No matter. However, after that experience with Deep Blue I really wanted more. I stumbled upon Tyler's song "Ditchdigger" and gave it a try. Of course, this time Tyler's always superb lyrics and vocals grabbed onto me, hook, line and sinker. As you can expect, pretty much the second after I found Ditchdigger I promptly dove head first into Tyler's discography and found a bunch of other stuff I loved. This includes "Brooklyn", which is arguably my single favourite song of all-time.

Yes, I promise all of that was necessary to tell you for you to understand the point that I'll be getting to eventually. For me, it was important to provide some sort of insight into my journey with these artists before truly getting into this.

While I certainly didn't realize it at first, 2020 had a very large amount of time just set aside for self-reflection and deep, wholly encompassing thought. Coupled with my discovery of Tyler's solo stuff and the release of The Midnight's latest album Monsters, I had reached the conclusion that the reason The Midnight and later Tyler's music had entrapped me as well as it did was because I could relate to it more than music written by anyone else. But then I had embarked onto this separate journey that led me to attempt to specifically analyze why their music was as relatable, for lack of a better word, as it was to me. And I've only recently come to the conclusion I was more or less searching for.

Analyzing your own fandom or interests can lead you down a very interesting rabbit hole of self-discovery and self-reflection, and can even be kind of weird to analyze something like that in-depth (especially with the knowledge that one of the subjects of this blog could end up reading it - hi). This all really started off a few weeks ago, at the end of the (to put it lightly) tumultuous year that was 2020. Over the past three years, since 2018, around Christmas time and leading up to the new year, I've entered what can only be described as an intense period of self-reflection. Trying to figure out and answer a bunch of questions that I have for myself; be it something that's personal, interpersonal or existential. Also over the past three years, these periods have been strongly accompanied by music written by The Midnight and Tyler Lyle.

I said to a close friend of mine a year or two ago that synthwave was the type of music that I dreamed of listening to as a kid, but for me The Midnight almost managed to bottle that feeling and put it into their music. For me, that has to do with how their songs are composed - both musically and lyrically. I also think that this analogy speaks to why I treasure and regard music from The Midnight and Tyler as highly as I do.

Lyrics from Los Angeles (another top contender for favorite song of all-time), "if we live forever, let us live forever tonight" shortly followed by "tomorrow we'll go back to our lives, with sand in our skin and sun in our eyes" is a perfect encapsulation about how I feel about their music.

The Midnight is the dream; what I wish life was and could be, and sometimes the frustration that it's not. Tyler's solo music feels like waking up to reality, accepting it for what it is and attempting to find the best in it - this is what "Brooklyn" is about, I think. Music by The Midnight feels like a gripping fantasy novel with amazing twists and turns, and when the chapter ends you want to instantly read the next one, or buy the next book in the series. Music by Tyler Lyle feels like an autobiography with a seemingly endless treasure trove of interesting stories to be told about the trials and tribulations of real life.

As someone who can occasionally feel like a wandering daydreamer, both are welcome.

It's mildly amusing to me, I started writing this entry a few hours ago with the expressed desire to try and figure out why I like my two favourite music artists in the world, and I'm not sure I've done that. I've explored it, at least, and explained it I think.

If nothing else, I can just link this blog now if I'm ever asked how I ever came to like my favorite kind of music instead of being an interesting person and actually talking about it. Thanks for reading.

TheMeltingMoon

I first came across The Midnight on the release day of Monsters. I scrolled through New Music on Apple Music and saw the cover of Monsters which looked intriguing. 80s Vibe cover and listed as Electronic music? Perfect. I gave 1991 and America Online a listen right away. Being a child of the 90s I immediately was into it but didn’t give the rest of the album an immediate listen. But now a few months into the Covid pandemic I was stressed, lonely, and going stir crazy like most of the world. I needed something to get me through those days. I slowly started listening to more songs on Monsters and over the next few months I began to uncover more of their discography. Deep Blue and Prom Night were my first obsessions but then Nocturnal, Endless Summer, and WeMoveForward became new favorites as I felt these songs were all on varied ends of this musical spectrum that was 100% me. I never heard a sound that was so relatable and I have never listened to another artists in my near 40 years that I immediately became that obsessed with. It was like finding your soul mate. I just knew they were my sound. Now and forever.

Thank you The Midnight and thank you to all the amazing fans and supporters out there.