Six years on from their last studio release, The Cult have revealed the details for their 11th album.
Titled ‘Under The Midnight Sun’, the eight-track effort is set to land on October 7 via Black Hill Records – find pre-orders here. News of the album came alongside the release of its lead single, ‘Give Me Mercy’, which guitarist Billy Duffy said in a press release “has all the hallmarks of the new classic Cult to my ears”.
Adding to the statement, frontman Ian Astbury said: “I was absolutely enamoured with this piece of music Billy had written, and it perfectly fit these thoughts I’d been having about our culture’s need to move past assumptions of duality. We need new language because words can’t express where we’re going.”
Have a look at the accompanying music video for ‘Give Me Mercy’, directed by Juan Azulay, below:
According to Astbury, much of The Cult’s new album was inspired by the Finnish festival Provinssirock, where they performed in 1986. Provinssirock is typically held over two or three days in the Southern Ostrobothnian city of Seinäjoki, where in the summer, it’s normal for the sun not to set until late in the morning.
Reminiscing on his experiences at Provinssirock, Astbury said: “It’s three in the morning, the sun’s up, and there’s all these beautiful people in this halcyon moment. People are laying on the grass, making out, drinking, smoking. There were rows of flowers at the front of the stage from the performances earlier that evening. It was an incredible moment.
“When the world stopped, I had this moment to write in real time, to calculate. I was compelled by this vision, this anomaly, this memory, of being under the midnight sun.”
The Cult’s last album was 2016’s ‘Hidden City’, which spawned four singles: ‘Deeply Ordered Chaos’, ‘Dark Energy’, ‘G.O.A.T.’ and ‘Hinterland’. Though fans have waited six years for ‘Under The Midnight Sun’ to materialise, it’s not the longest gap the band have had between records – that milestone was set with the 2001 release of their seventh album, ‘Beyond Good And Evil’, which arrived seven years after their eponymous 1994 album.
