Midland's New Album 2024: ‘Barely Blue’ Release Date & Tracklist

Midland aren't known for being too liberal with their unreleased teasers and social media snippets, but thankfully, the band have been getting a little more active online of late as they gear up to drop their highly anticipated fourth studio album, Barely Blue.

The project will drop everywhere on September 20th, 2024, with the much-loved Texas trio sharing a brand new single, the jaunty, feel-good ‘Lucky Sometimes’ in tandem with the official album announcement, which came towards the end of June.

The arrival of ‘Lucky Sometimes’ once again accelerates the pace of the album rollout with Midland having previously released the lead single, ‘Old Fashioned Feeling'.

Barely Blue marks the group's first song with Dave Cobb as producer, with the nostalgic, sepia-tinged project being recorded at Georgia Mae Studios in Savannah, Georgia. Speaking as part of the unveiling, Cameron Duddy explained the innovation Cobb brought to the table, “We knew we wanted to go somewhere else. We are all big believers in a certain time and place, a sense of classic country that comes from roadhouses and bad coffee, miles and miles and miles on the road – and the idea that, even though we’re all happy, love and life falls apart, but that doesn’t mean you have to, too. When we were writing these songs, it was a trip into all the things in country music we love. You don’t hear much of this kind of unfiltered, hard stuff that comes with the great guitar sounds, the deep harmonies and shuffles you can tuck into. But that’s the essence of what Midland is – and Dave Cobb brought a new altitude to our sound”.

Mark Wystrach, the Midland frontman, emphasised how keen the three artists were to hit the studio with the renowned producer, who's helped craft records for Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, John Prine, Jason Isbell, The Highwomen, ZAYN and more, “Dave Cobb had been a producer we wanted to work with since we first heard Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. Dave’s eclectic musical background and the way he approaches recording as an experience and not a task made him the perfect match for us. On Barely Blue, we feel like Dave helped us find the sound we’ve been searching for for a long time”.

The Texas band's previous album, 2022's The Last Resort: Greetings From, was primarily set against the backdrop of a broken-down Floridian motel, which mirrored the protagonist's heartbreak as he desperately sought a coastal escape from his troubles.

It's still unclear whether Midland's 2024 project will be another concept album, but band-member Cameron Duddy did reveal some fascinating details about the record in a recent interview.

Duddy shared with Texas Music Magazine that the band were originally planning to drop the record in May, before outlining, “It’s an eight track album that we recorded with Dave Cobb in Savannah, Georgia over a two week stint in early December”.

He explained, “It’s the first time we’ve worked with Dave - and really the first time that we, since our first record, have lived in a studio and recorded that way. And man, it’s just mind blowing the results that we got when going back to that way of recording”.

Duddy excitingly concluded, “What I can say, is that this is the most poignant thing that we’ve ever recorded, and really a level up in terms of songwriting and musicianship”.

Hopefully, we'll get another single before Barely Blue's September 20th release date rolls around - but if not, we'll still be dusting off our cowboy hats and crooning gleefully along to ‘Lucky Sometimes’ and ‘Old Fashioned Feeling’ in the meantime.

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Featured photo by Laura Ord