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"America Online"
"America Online"
Single by The Midnight
from the album Monsters
Released	May 13, 2019
Length	5:49
Label	Counter Records
Songwriter(s)	Tim McEwan; Tyler Lyle;
Producer(s)	Tim McEwan
Monsters track listing
	Monsters "1991 (intro)"; "America Online"; "Dance With Somebody"; "Seventeen"; "Dream Away"; "The Search for Ecco"; "Prom Night"; "Fire In The Sky"; "Monsters"; "Helvetica"; "Brooklyn"; "Deep Blue"; "Night Skies"; "City Dreams (interlude)"; "Last Train";
The Midnight singles chronology

"Brooklyn. Friday. Love."
"Brooklyn. Friday. Love."
Single by The Midnight
from the album Heroes
Released	August 3, 2022
Length	3:52
Label	Counter Records
Songwriter(s)	Tim McEwan; Tyler Lyle; Nikki Flores; Royce Whittaker;
Producer(s)	Tim McEwan
Heroes track listing
	Heroes "Golden Gate"; "Brooklyn. Friday. Love."; "Heartbeat"; "A Place of Her Own"; "Heroes"; "Heart Worth Breaking"; "Loved By You"; "Aerostar"; "Change Your Heart or Die"; "Avalanche"; "Souvenir"; "Photograph"; "Energy Never Dies, It Just Transforms";
The Midnight singles chronology

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Brooklyn. Friday. Love.

Brooklyn. Friday. Love. single cover

Brooklyn. Friday. Love. is a song by The Midnight. It is the fourth single and second track from their album Heroes. The single was released on August 3, 2022.^[1]

The song was written by band members Tyler Lyle and Tim McEwan alongside Nikki Flores and Royce Whittaker. It was produced by McEwan. It has a running time of three minutes and 52 seconds and is in the key of F major. Brooklyn. Friday. Love. has its roots in Lyle's From The Secret Lair project, first appearing on episodes 7 and 25 of season one before being released on Mr. Green's B Sides. A breakdown of the track by McEwan was streamed on Twitch on August 5, 2022.^[2]

In an interview with Magnetic Magazine, Lyle elaborated on the song's meaning:^[3]

I wrote the initial version of Brooklyn. Friday. Love. in 2016 as a surf rock song while I was living in Ft. Greene. On days when I couldn’t stand staring at my computer screen anymore- usually around 4:00, I would get on a Citibike and ride up Flushing Avenue around the Navy Yard to Williamsburg.
My wife was working long hours at a corporate job in Midtown and usually wasn’t home before 8, so I would walk, well, I would walk and drink Happy Hour bourbon and cokes at Skinny Dennis, and I would look for books at Spoonbill & Sugartown, and vinyl at Rough Trade.
There was a refreshingly weird creative energy that permeated gentrifying Brooklyn that I’d never felt before. It struck me as a kind of weirdo heaven for a kid who grew up in the Bible Belt. When I die I want to go to Skinny Dennis and hear Zydeco or some Bushwick loft party Modular Synth set. Anyway, the place changed.
Apple and Whole Foods soon arrived in Williamsburg and Ft. Greene, the rents went up, the neighbors were no longer starving artist types. My wife and I also grew up- we had a baby and shortly thereafter we decided to end our five year relationship with Brooklyn.
The song became a Midnight song in 2021- two years after I left Brooklyn for Atlanta. I went back to visit New York for the first time during a lull in COVID waves to see my old neighborhood. 1/3 of the businesses were closed. There was more graffiti, and trash piled on the street like I’d never seen it before. I felt like I was seeing the ghost of an old friend. Reworking the song as an idyll to fit The Midnight felt like a way to honor the strangeness and vibrancy of a Brooklyn that seemed to disappear.
Thankfully most of the splendor has returned to the shabby neighborhoods I love, but I’m approaching my late 30s now, with a family and a mortgage and a more predictable life. The thought of drinking absinthe, or staying up past midnight to watch live music, or spending a day writing indie pop songs in an unheated Bushwick squat is unimaginable. This song is about an ideal that may still exist. It just can’t exist for me anymore.

America Online

America Online^[4] is a song by The Midnight. It is the first single and second track from their album Monsters. The single was released on May 13, 2019.^[5]

The song was written by band members Tim McEwan and Tyler Lyle and produced by McEwan. It has a running time of five minutes and 49 seconds and is in the key of B minor.

During a tour stop in the Spring 2019 Tour about a month before the single's release, the band talked with NewRetroWave about America Online:^[6]

As a kid you’re sort of [disconnected] from the world… But when you’re in your teenage years, everything is sort of inner-conflict, relationships, all happening at once. The tensions of romantic love, acceptance in groups and things like that. …it’s not a sunset right? It’s more of a sort of blog track. I love going on vaporwave track playlists on youtube. I love the low-grade, low-fi, bitcrushed sound – it’s like that but with a bit more of a cleaner palette, a cleaner mix. So, that one will set the tone. Tyler is definitely on it, but in a bit more of a…vocodery way.

In an interview with Magnetic Magazine after the release of Monsters, The Midnight further stated:^[7]

Tim: This sets the tone for our album. We’re in the era of connectivity. Gone are the days of being a kid, riding around on bikes, exploring the world around you. You’re a teen now and your nights are spent online in your bedroom, logged onto chat rooms, while the door to your parents is shut and you are searching for your own identity.

Tyler: This track was basically done and we’d decided to do it as an instrumental, but at the last minute I decided to try and write something. By that time we knew what the album was about roughly. This became the premise of the record- is love necessarily reciprocal- is hate? What is intimacy without proximity? Are we really connected at the bottom of all of this, especially when “all of this” is mediated by so many layers that seem un-human.

According to McEwan, the synth used in the opening of America Online is Serum with EchoMelt 2 added to get the uneven tape jitter effect.^[8] The vocoder used is a mix of VocalSynth 2 from iZotope and BitSpeek.

The date on the single artwork for America Online is August 6, 1991, which is the day the world's first website was published by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.^[9]^[10]

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News

29th October, 2024: Tour - The Midnight are announced as part of the lineup for the 2025 Tecate Pal Norte music festival in Monterrey, Mexico. The Midnight will perform on April 4, the first day of the festival.
18th October, 2024: Tour - The Chrome Nights North American Tour concludes in Denver.
4th October, 2024: Music - The Midnight's remix of Lost And Found by Chromeo is released. The remix is included on the deluxe edition of Chromeo's album Adult Contemporary.
1st October, 2024: Merch - The Midnight: Shadows graphic novel is released.

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