The Midnight
The Midnight Credit: Courtesy

“We wrote an apocalyptic record just in time for the apocalypse. Tim was going through a bad breakup. My wife was in cancer treatment when this record was being written and produced. And there’s this kind of pet thought about the end times, but when you’re in the chemo ward and really facing mortality down from a pretty close place, you recognize the apocalypse is not a one-time event. The apocalypse is going to happen 8 billion times, for each person alive. We all have to reckon with what our time is worth and what it’s for and that we are the ones that have to make it matter. And that seems to be the wisdom, the fruit of such a bitter and dark and difficult time — at the end of the day, you have to make peace with the end and if it’s not the end, then you have to rage against the dying of the light.”

The Midnight’s frontman and fulcrum, Tyler Lyle, is talking with Orlando Weekly about the end of the world. We know very well that we should be talking more about the band’s upcoming tour (which is exciting!) and ambitious new album, Syndicate (which is very good!), but the world has careened far away from the usual.

And yet, The Midnight are heading out on a big U.S. tour with New Constellations that kicks off in Florida at the end of the week, and Lyle’s enthusiasm is infectious. The Midnight’s show features a new live configuration for the band after Lyle’s creative comrade Tim McEwan decided to step back from touring (more on that in a second), and production that will be a cut above from the usual, befitting a band who walks the line between nostalgia and future-forward with a particular brio and swagger. 

“We’ll have video walls that we created bespoke content for. It’s audio, it’s video, it’s lights. We’ve got these cool new lasers,” gushes Lyle. “There are four of them on stage, and we’re really excited to get to play with those.”

This U.S. run is dubbed the “Time Machines” tour and it’s apropos for a group like The Midnight, who emerged from the synthwave scene in 2012, but used the retro aesthetics of that particular scene — 8-bit videogames, John Carpenter and Vangelis scores, Blade Runner production stills — to launch them into new sonic vistas. 

“It’s the Time Machines tour, and we are the time machines. There’s a double-edged sword, when thinking about nostalgia especially as the premise for your music project. There’s often a temptation to want to disappear in nostalgia to think that, you know, the glory days were better, that’s where we want to live, but that can be a trap. That’s a regression,” says Lyle. “We’re pushing things out a little farther, seeing how much, how far we can take it.”

This realization that nostalgia can be its own gilded cage — as well as knowing their way around a good chorus — has given The Midnight a staying power that many of their erstwhile synthwave peers did not have. 

“I think the creative friction between Tim and myself has been the secret sauce. I’m a songwriter from the Deep South. I grew up with Smithsonian Folkways, blues, bluegrass, gospel, country music. My dad was a songwriter who wrote country music and tried to make it in Nashville,” explains Lyle. “And Tim grew up in Copenhagen and was listening to pop and dance music and knows a lot about jazz chord backgrounds. We come musically from very different worlds. So whereas he’s trying to create the perfect scene, I’m just trying to write a good song. I think that balance has been helpful for us.”

Which brings us to the glitch in the matrix that is McEwan stepping back from his touring duties in The Midnight, and confining his band activities solely to the studio and songwriting. But Lyle asserts that McEwan’s fingerprints are still all over the tour and the setlist. 

“Tim and Oliver [McEwan, Tim’s brother] and I sat in Atlanta and planned the set out, so every second onstage has some of Tim’s imprint on it. A lot of these decisions are his. But Tim never did that great on the road. He was pushing 40 when The Midnight started touring, and it’s hard to learn how to tour in a bus at 40. I’ve been doing it since my early 20s, and it’s a difficult gig. I think he’s much happier in the producer chair.”

And a happier McEwan in the producer’s chair is undeniably a good thing, given the sprawling sense of electronic ambition that defines Syndicate. It’s the sound of a band trying out new voices and new ideas as they say goodbye to their own past amid an increasingly uncertain future. And The Midnight’s live incarnation will soon be traversing that same uncertain world.

“The American myth is dying. And I think that there is some responsibility as an artist to tell that story truthfully, and to also be with the fans as they are grieving their own moments — or celebrating their own moments — like we are. We are there to amplify what’s already there in the ether,” says Lyle.

We talk about how the communal concert experience, bodies gathering in a space to experience the same thing at the same time, can be in its own way a quasi-subversive act when the powers that be want us separated, isolated, divided and gulping up lies on social media. The live music experience is one of the precious few things we can remain optimistic about.

“I think the last 15 years have been marked by devaluing location and community, amplifying online influencer culture, celebrity culture, de-localizing. And I think that the future is obviously going to be radically changed, but I think it’ll be local. I think it’ll be noisy, I think it’ll be communal, and I think it’ll be live,” says Lyle.

“With recorded music, I don’t know what the future is, but I think live music has a sturdy place in our future, because there’s few avenues to have these moments of collective effervescence with each other. There’s really just drugs, sex and live concerts and I don’t see the internet really replacing the real nectar, the real cherry on top, the real goodness of those things.”

And yes, Lyle promises a dance party vibe to end each show. Just in time.

The Midnight, with New Constellations: 7 p.m. Friday, April 17, House of Blues, orlando.houseofblues.com, $47-$141.

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This article appears in April 15-21, 2026.