Premature Evaluation: Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds Mutiny After Midnight

We're reaching nearly unprecedented levels of giving no fuks while simultaneously giving all the fuks. Sturgill Simpson cares deeply — about love and lust; about the state of his country and the state of his soul; about crafting vibrant records and putting on euphoric shows — and he continues to project a swaggering indifference about what anyone else thinks about his creative twists and turns. "You win some, you lose some," he recently wrote, "but in the end you're left with the real ones." With Mutiny After Midnight, his second album as Johnny Blue Skies and first billed as Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds, alt-country's psychedelic outlaw philosopher king lays his heart on the table, and also his dick. 

The first Johnny Blue Skies album, 2024's exceptional Passage du Desir, was shot through with melancholia. After ending his promised run of five Sturgill Simpson albums with the explosive futuristic ZZ Top roadhouse pivot Sound & Fury and the stripped-down cowboys-and-Indians narrative The Ballad Of Dood & Juanita, Simpson and his longtime band tapped back into the classicist country-rock that put him on the map a decade earlier. They were on their Silver Bullet Band shit, cranking out premium dad-rock in a swamp of sadness. In his incomparable Kentucky drawl, Simpson sang about romantic discord, confusion in a cruel world, an estranged friend who'd died before they could reconnect, and attempting to shake his blues away with scooter rides, boat trips, and jogs on the beach. Even a love song like the instant classic "If The Sun Never Rises Again" grooved along in a minor key, haunted by the fear that everything good must someday end.

Sadness and looming dread are present on Mutiny After Midnight too, but Simpson is waging war on them with everything in his arsenal — including, per the man himself, his status on the spectrum. "Weaponizing my autism to shit out an opus," he sings on the cheeky scene-setting opener "Make America Fuk Again," a song about waking up from a long malaise and getting to work. Facing down a bleak landscape but enthralled with the musical mind meld they'd been achieving on tour, Simpson and his comrades Laur Joamets (guitar), Kevin Black (bass), Miles Miller (drums), and Robbie Crowell (keys/sax) rolled into a Nashville recording studio and set out to make a dance record for the End Times. He explained their thought process in a letter to fans that has helpfully contextualized this endeavor:

Inspired heavily from endless hours on the bus watching old clips of the great fusion-funk band 'Stuff, and revisiting off-the-beaten-track concept records like Marvin Gaye's "In Our Lifetime", where, in what looks like the end of the world, the artist's response is, "Let's dance and make love."…we decided to make an album centered firmly on groove. We started every day from scratch with a basic groove, I wrote the songs and lyrics in the moment on-the-spot, and everyone established their individual parts servicing the songs and not the individual ego.

The resulting record blurs country, rock, funk, disco, and more into nine joyous slabs of self-professed "American Music" that boogie hard enough to jolt you out of your doldrums. The Dark Clouds acquitted themselves gorgeously on Passage du Desir, but they are absolutely cooking here, throwing off much of that album's tasteful restraint in pursuit of "pure, unfiltered, unapologetic, relentless disco-hedonism." It's an album designed to stand in the face of oppression, divided into songs about "the dark state of the world and the bright state of love," full of saucy sax and percussive guitar and bass lines that don't walk so much as they saunter.

If Simpson's letter is the album's skeleton key, "Make America Fuk Again" is its sonic manifesto. This band has beheld the United States in the 2020s — with its crypto goons and prediction markets, its masked secret police led by racist incel weiners, its gilded oligarchs shielding each other from consequences — and declared it all to be profoundly unsexy. "Wanna make America fuk again/ Wanna make America wanna love again," he declares on the chorus. "Things have been worse but I can't remember when/ Wanna start a revolution, watch it begin." It's country-funk for a country in a funk, threaded with references to Simpson overcoming his own struggles (depression, addiction, ADHD) and flaunting his sexual prowess. "I got that Hunter Biden energy," he declares, boastfully. "I'll make a hooker fuck around and fall in love."

This is an album about "joy as an act of resistance," as the cliché goes, but even more so, it's an album about fucking. (Fuk-ing?) Because the topical songs bookend the record, let's deal with them first. Arriving directly after "Make America Fuk Again," the rip-roaring rocker "Excited Delirium" rebukes ICE for inciting conflict under the guise of keeping peace: "I hear you screaming telling me to get down/ I hear you telling me not to resist/ Hard to move with your knee on my neck/ Hard to have a conversation with fourteen fists." Raucous closer "Ain't That A Bitch" offers a more holistic condemnation of Donald Trump and his democracy-eroding peers before Simpson imagines being subjected to forms of torture like waterboarding and being stuck next to Katy Perry on a rocket to Mars. "The poor get poor and the rich get rich," he laments over a hard-slamming backbeat. "Nothin' ever changes, baby, ain't that a bitch?"

And that's pretty much it for the political fare. Every track in between is about sex, a six-song marathon of burning desire and ecstatic release that lands somewhere between the Song Of Solomon and the Kama Sutra, or maybe between William Shakespeare and Lil Wayne. ("Just let me be your lollipop, taste that sweet sensation," Simpson beckons on "Situation.") Often, our boy Johnny is consumed by a desperate attraction, showering his lady with poetic language ("Viridescent") and comparing her to every goddess he can think of ("Venus"). Sometimes, he gets outright freaky, as on the punishingly funky "Stay On That," on which music theory becomes crude shorthand for human anatomy: "Stay on that D, baby, to hit that G." And if "Everyone Is Welcome," which starts to nudge the subject matter back toward the political, doesn't end with an invitation to an orgy, I don't know how else to interpret a lyric like "Two is enough but three's a whole lot of fun/ Four's a fuckin' party where everybody comes."

For all its righteous bluster and innuendo, Mutiny At Midnight might be most potent at its most tender. "Don't Let Go," our bridge into the steamy segment of the tracklist, moves with as much verve and propulsion as anything here, but whereas most of this album blasts off into the Sound & Fury zone, this one lingers in Passage du Desir mode. The song is a big-hearted affirmation to Simpson's wife that after all these years, she still mesmerizes him, delivered in simple, beautiful language: "Ain't no way around it, we're getting older/ And the world outside these walls is gеtting colder/ Every night I lay down next to you, I start to smoldеr/ I fall apart, surrender to your love." On an album where the heat is often confined to the lower regions, it may be the most heartwarming song he's recorded since welcoming his child into the world on A Sailor's Guide To Earth.

So yes, even on an album with such a laser-focused sense of purpose, Sturgill Simpson contains multitudes, and he'll surely inspire a multitude of reactions. Some will undoubtedly find these missives trite or corny, and I can imagine some pearl-clutching about a few of the lyrics, like the "weaponizing my autism" bit or the well-meaning moment when he insists he won't be heading to Mars "if there ain't no Black people on the ship." Maybe you just wish he would just make Metamodern Sounds In Country Music again, or maybe you're a misguided MAGA country fan who wandered into the wrong smoky '70s dive bar. Maybe you're steamed about Simpson putting the album on YouTube after insisting it would be physical-only.

But as someone ​​who once found this guy's cockiness off-putting, who at first struggled to wrap my mind around the anime-soundtrack mecha-boogie of Sound & Fury, who has historically preferred downcast albums like Passage du Desir and casual side quests like the Cuttin' Grass series over the sound of this band cutting loose in behemoth mode, I can't imagine rejecting an invite to their apocalyptic dance party. Maybe it's just that I'm fully settled into my forties now, or maybe the Dark Clouds are simply growing more powerful with each passing year. Maybe I've learned to stop nit-picking and appreciate the handful of maverick rock stars we've got left. Whatever the reason for my conversion, as I've blazed through Mutiny After Midnight again and again, I've found the charisma intoxicating and the chemistry awe-inspiring. Simpson doesn't give a fuk what I think, but I think we're lucky to have him.

Mutiny After Midnight is out physically 3/13 via Atlantic Outpost. Pre-order it here.