It was an incredible moment."Īcross its eight tracks, Under the Midnight Sun evokes this ethereal phenomenon via Duffy's shimmering, reverb-washed guitars and Astbury's gravelly, vibrato-laden baritone. "There were rows of flowers at the front of the stage from the performances earlier that evening. "People are laying on the grass, making out, drinking, smoking," Astbury recalled. The album title was inspired by the band's 1986 performance at Finland's Provinssirock festival, where they basked in the titular midnight sun during summer when the sun doesn't set north of the Arctic Circle. On Under the Midnight Sun, their 11th album and first since 2016’s Hidden City, the Cult incorporates both sides of this musical duality, with Astbury's esoteric musings getting a slight edge. This musical yin and yang resulted in a triptych of classic albums - 1985's Love, 1987's Electric and 1989's Sonic Temple - that ran the gamut from goth rock to quasi-glam metal, and it showed the Cult’s ability to adapt to changing musical trends without becoming beholden to them, keeping fans on their toes all the while. For nearly 40 years, the West Yorkshire band's driving creative force has been the push and pull of singer Ian Astbury's post-punk spiritualism and guitarist Billy Duffy's arena-rock histrionics. The Cult has always defied easy categorization.
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