Last year The Buttertones put out Gravedigging, but on their newest LP Midnight In A Moonless Dream out today [May 4] on Innovative Leisure, they’re digging deeper and discovering something dark. If Gravedigging felt like an oversaturated spaghetti-western desertscape, Midnight is much more biting—music made for the swampland that spit out Australia’s Mad Scientists, or for the Mickey Spillane night city where the Cramps met all those garbagemen and werewolves.
Midnight was made in two flash sessions at Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio withGravedigging producer Jonny Bell, whose genre-smashing record collection and appetite for experimentation made for a perfect match. On this album, they’d decided, everything would be new—not just new sounds, like their first-ever string section, but new ways of working together and writing together.Gravedigging played like the soundtrack to a good heist movie, but Midnight was like the true story itself—a perfect and intricate crime, executed by a crew of professionals under cover of night.