The Cult have shared a new song today with the release of ‘A Cut Inside’, off their forthcoming new album Under The Midnight Sun. An album highlight, ‘A Cut Inside’ rides guitarist Billy Duffy’s lithe electric lead and hypnotic rhythms, with lead singer Ian Astbury eying the community around him with suspicion. “No heathens in heaven/ No sweet surrender/ Outsiders forever/ Ghosts of our lives,” he emotes. The song refuses to be contained. Listen to ‘A Cut Inside’ HERE.
‘A Cut Inside’ premiered with BBC 6Music on Monday (Sept 5th) alongside an interview with Billy Duffy on the Craig Charles show.
‘A Cut Inside’ follows the debut single ‘Give Me Mercy,’ a song that Consequence said “feels classically Cult, as the band envelopes their gothic rock influences with a modern sheen.” It also proved a UK radio hit, becoming a longstanding feature on the Planet Rock A-List as well as receiving support from Radio 2. Listen to ‘Give Me Mercy’ HERE
Under the Midnight Sun was produced by Tom Dalgety (Pixies, Ghost, Royal Blood) and will be released October 7th via Black Hill Records. Pre-order the album HERE. And today, the band has revealed the eight tracks that make up the album.
Under The Midnight Sun track list:
1 – Mirror
2 – A Cut Inside
3 – Vendetta X
4 – Give Me Mercy
5 – Outer Heaven
6 – Knife Through Butterfly Heart
7 – Impermanence
8 – Under The Midnight Sun
When the sun just wouldn’t leave the sky one evening in Finland, Ian Astbury took notice. Walking the grounds of the Provinssirock festival, Astbury found himself revelling in the surreal, almost occult moment that comes with the “midnight sun”, the summer stretch where the sun doesn’t go down north of the Arctic Circle. “It’s three in the morning, the sun’s up, and there’s all these beautiful people in this halcyon moment,” Astbury remembers. “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.” While reviewing archival footage of the performance, Astbury found new mysticism in that moment and imbued it into the forthcoming Under the Midnight Sun.
Leading to 2020, The Cult had been on a rolling cycle of releasing albums, touring, and recording. As the world shut down and everyone was forced to reprioritise the way they approached life and work. “When the world stopped, I had this moment to write in real time, to calculate,” says Astbury. When lockdown lifted and the group could meet to record, they teamed up with Dalgety. “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.”
Lyrically, Under the Midnight Sun bolsters that new musical dexterity by building out from the idyllic and surreal vision at its title. Throughout, Astbury pulls in influences from Brian Jones, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Buddhism, the Beats, and the Age of Aquarius, all shaded with the lingering threat of the present and the timeless Cult colour palette.
As The Cult are now returning to performing live and sharing Under the Midnight Sun, Astbury hopes that the record connects to something deep within and subconscious in their listeners—something Astbury found within himself when given the moment to look for it. “At the core of it all, music contains the vibrational frequency of how we once communicated before we could even speak,” he says. “Bird songs, animal calls, string theory, quantum physics, psychedelics. The record ultimately is about finding and uniting beauty in those strangely natural moments.”
