Sturgill Simpson plays his Gibson ES-335 like he was born upside down. He came in shit-hot with a dynamite honky-tonk sound in 2013 but quickly pivoted to acid country on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music a year later. By 2016 he was channeling the psychedelic soul of Marvin Gaye and Al Green on A Sailor’s Guide to Earth before going full anime synth-rock for Sound & Fury. But no one expected him to drop three consecutive bluegrass albums after that (two of which feature only Scruggs-and-Flatt-style reimaginings of his old songs), only for Passage du Desir to turn those ‘grassers into cosmic, midlife-crisis Americana in 2024. All these songs about psilocybin, walking on Legos, and a good ol’ pooch named Sam strewn over the last decade speak to the genius of this Kentucky bedlamite with “Hunter Biden energy.” It’s like he has a telepathic bond with everyone from street pickers to old souls to the almighty himself. Bob Dylan once said Roy Orbison’s voice could “make you want to drive your car over a cliff,” but Simpson’s makes you want to wrap your Camaro Z28 around a tree.
When Simpson shared last month that he and his Dark Clouds bandmates (guitarist Laur Joamets, keyboardist Robbie Crowell, bassist Kevin Black, and drummer Miles Miller) wanted to “make an album centered firmly on groove” in retaliation to America’s embrace of fascism—a “protest against oppression and suppression” powered by “pure, unfiltered, unapologetic, relentless disco-hedonism”—I didn’t dare try to guess how deep his dance would run. Not knowing a lick about Mutiny After Midnight beyond what Simpson shared about it online, I imagined the songs stomping like Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Jaded Lover,” or cruising and curling like Eddie Rabbitt’s “Drivin’ My Life Away.” Upon landing on YouTube last weekend without warning (after being announced as a physical-only release), the album sounds exactly as it was described: uncensored, depraved, and totally batshit—concocted not by a record company, but by an outlaw who excels in the explicit art of not giving a single “fuk.” Think Sound & Fury burnouts done up in A Sailor’s Guide to Earth brass and 20-year-old college boy wall-hanging phrases, or Nile Rodgers in ZZ Top drag. I think @KingLazyEye may have said it best in the album’s rowdy YouTube comment section last weekend: “Im drinkin wild turkey and building improvised explosives in the woods.”
Simpson and the Dark Clouds are on a country-funk tear in Mutiny After Midnight, as if they cleaned up a Nugs.net recording from one of their many three-hour shows for a wide release. Dickey Betts once tried explaining the difference between the Allman Brothers’ jams and the Grateful Dead’s jams. What he came up with was: the Allmans force the magic to happen, but the Dead wait for the magic to happen. Simpson and his “Reckon Crew” do both, gliding from one song to the next, letting muscular guitar riffs defrost into mirror-ball rhythms and vibe-driven sustains. “Viridescent” and “Situation” both spin out in total disco meltdowns. The conclusion of “Everyone Is Welcome Here” flirts with “Get Lucky” territory until Raw B’s febrile saxophone uncorks. Recalling the Silver Bullet Band à la Stranger in Town, “Excited Delirium” cuts in with high-speed exploits, snaring slide-guitar rowdies, saxophone convulsions, and fat kick drums in abundance. The tongue-in-cheek “Stay On That” is a high-def sex caper full of funky blasts, joke-book come-ons, and Lowell George-style innuendos like “baby, let me be the banana and you can be the split” and “stay on that D, baby, ‘til you hit that G.” Simpson reaches carnal activation in the orange-white flames of “Situation,” talking about bodies that are “hotter than a brothel in Guam.” And, of course, “Make America Fuk Again” is pure dance-music medicine on steel blades.
I usually have a distaste for most “Make America ___ Again” slogan substitutes, but the way Simpson excitedly sows his libidinous oats with bratty, strung-out winks on “Make America Fuk Again” is a roadhouse rave-up for the ages. He substitutes the middle-aged pinch of Passage du Desir with vertical ramblings of ketamine therapy, “doing dark shit in dark rooms,” and “mak[ing] a hooker fuck around and fall in love.” Simpson prattles through cornball missives, like the one about going to Mars but only if the spaceship’s got Black people on it and the “wanna get you wet, wanna make you sweat, wanna make the walls in the room drip with precipitation” verse in “Situation,” but Simpson’s smoky, outlaw-country delivery is measured in centuries and his bandmates back him up with a wild, gritty, workingman’s pocket.
Simpson doesn’t traffic in polished advocacy speech on Mutiny After Midnight, nor does he posture himself to be some great white hope. Instead, he abjectly lists off all the shit he doesn’t believe in: relevance, the game, narrative, name, regret, shame, blame, anything anymore. He argues that sex is an antidote to fascism just like Marvin Gaye argued on In Our Lifetime, that we need to question “how the hell are all these guys not in jail for treason” while making life a hot-rod party where “everybody cums” and the cops can’t come in even if they’re called. The record begins and ends with unfiltered, uncomplicated politicking about “hegemonic systems,” manufactured chaos, and content creators under authoritarian rule. “Take the constitution, systematically dismantle it,” he lets out in an urgent growl on “Ain’t That a Bitch.” “Rebuild your agenda, sit back and admire it. Keep the peasants scraping by on minimum wages; lock up all the minorities, put their babies in cages. Anybody speak out, you simply dismiss them.” You can’t lampoon cruelty, so Simpson sings it like he sees it—like we all see it.
He knows when to rein in the horn-dogisms, too. When he’s not comparing his dick to a lollipop, he’s “weaponizing [his] autism to shit out an opus,” tearing down ICE, living through George Floyd’s final minutes, entertaining nihilism on the doorstep of an apocalypse, and singing love songs. Side one’s “Don’t Let Go,” a spiritual sibling to “Just Let Go” from Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, is a kind, swooning tribute to Simpson’s wife, Sarah. “I swear to God time slows down every time you walk in the room,” he croons above a medley of piano, slide guitar, and saxophone. “For a while it felt like we were dying but now we’re starting to bloom.” All of Simpson’s records have immediate standouts—this decade alone has given us “If the Sun Never Rises Again” and “Jaunita”—but I don’t think Simpson’s made a tune with this much verve or heart in ten years. The love story culminates in side two’s smoldering “Venus,” a goddess-worshipping, bar-cage romp that casts Simpson’s wife as the daughter of Zeus whose “celestial light” brightens the heavens: “Even Van Gogh painted your star on the right.”
There seems to be a lot more city cowboys in designer jeans than hillbillies with Telecasters across their backs and longhorns nailed to the grills of their Cadillacs these days. The former is what gets called “country music,” anyhow. If authenticity was still a valuable currency in this worried old world, most of those boys wouldn’t have a pot to piss in. Country music never got bad; worse voices just started talking louder than the ones we needed to hear. Sure, people are going to hear this record and call Simpson a commie or a libtard more than they already do, or they might post on Facebook that he’s been infected with the woke mind virus. But I wouldn’t pay the ghouls any mind. This is the guy who won Best Country Album at the Grammys, tossed the brass in his empty guitar case, and, as a “struggling country singer,” busked for ACLU donations outside the CMAs. He’s allowed to talk his shit however he pleases—like calling Donald Trump a “bad cartoon in an ill-fitting suit grabbing women by the poon,” or comparing the torture of waterboarding to sitting by Katy Perry on Blue Origin NS-31.
Mutiny after Midnight is not some No Fences, reach-across-the-aisle sedative, but a look at where country music can go if the right hearts get all the attention. It brings to mind the chicken-fried grooves, CB-radio prose, and backwoods picking that cleared a path for Hank Williams tunes and redneck rock to travel side by side. It’s brand-new music that already sounds like a linchpin of mid-century America. 50 years ago, players like Jerry Reed and Clarence White lived in-between the margins of Merle and Jones, wandering genius Gram Parsons taught a couple Los Angeles boys how to dose their roots with some Georgia psychedelia, and Johnny Cash showed up at the White House to sing “What is Truth?” to an irate Richard Nixon. In the cosmos of all that shit exists Simpson, whose maverick sexuality and pilled-up dissent may as well be some sort of rabid glossolalia to those Nashville kiss-asses who make records for the “patriotism and Christianity” party. But I prefer Simpson when he’s a manic, daredevil creature like this, not some porch-swing preacher. There’s no time for an identity crisis or a mainstream-country-friendly about-face when the boogie’s in your blood. [High Top Mountain/Atlantic]
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
