The War On Drugs bassist Dave Hartley has unveiled a new video and single from his side project, Nightlands. A big contrast from the sweeping, heartland rock of the Grammy-winning band, Nightlands’ new song “No Kiss For The Lonely” brings in waves of electronic ambiguity, a la the Blue Nile.
The song is off Nightlands’ forthcoming Moonshine, which is out on July 15 via Western Vinyl. According to a statement, the track “is anthemic, and takes poetic aim at xenophobia beneath a canopy of chiming bells, kalimba-like textures, and glassy vocoded passages.”
“I’m a firm believer that the best lyrics come with no interference from the brain’s cognitive capacities,” Hartley says in a statement. “They just tumble out with the meaning to be parsed later. This song was definitely an example of that. The lyrics came all at once and capture a lot of the exasperation and anger I feel when I read the news.”
The song was a collaborative effort, with Severin Tucker on synth bass, Eric Slick taking on its drum loop, and vocal stacks by Hartley, Eliza Hardy Jones, Anthony LaMarca, Jesse Hale Moore, and Michael Kiley.
Nightlands tapped Michael Flanagan to direct the video. The track is the band’s first new music since their 2017 I Can Feel the Night Around Me.
