A glorious time is upon us: Ryan Gosling is making indie rock again. All the way back in 2009, Gosling got together with a guy named Zach Shields, and the two of them bonded over the shared experience of getting scared on Disney's Haunted Mansion ride. They started making music together under the name Dead Man's Bones, and they released one very cool album of eerie, folky music, with backing vocals from the Silverlake Conservatory Children's Choir.
They played a few live shows around Halloween 2009, too. Now, as the prophecy foretold a few days ago, Dead Man's Bones are back with their first new song in 17 years. In the time since Dead Man's Bones released their self-titled debut, Ryan Gosling has become an even bigger movie star, while Zach Shields has established himself as a Hollywood screenwriter, working on some of the recent American Godzilla movies and the forthcoming Weapons prequel Gladys.
In interviews, Gosling has played it coy on the subject of whether Dead Man's Bones could ever return, and the announcement of their resurrection came as the best kind of surprise. Today, they release a brand new single called "Lost In The Night." As of right now, we don't know whether "Lost In The Night" is a one-off or whether it's destined to become part of some larger project. Gosling and Shields have evidently done strong work in keeping this secret, since it has evidently been in the works for a while.
According to a press release, the two band members attempted to record at "several Los Angeles studios without finding the sound they wanted." Instead, they found their best results when they "took two guitars, two drum machines, and two synthesizers to a farm outside the city and recorded the song in a day." This time around there's no children's choir on the track, and its sound doesn't have a whole lot of Arcade Fire in its DNA. Instead, "Lost In The Night" is reverb-heavy, atmospheric goth-rock with just the slightest hint of rockabilly in its guitar lines. (A press release names Bruce Springsteen and Suicide as touchpoints, and I also hear distant traces of the Cure.) Ryan Gosling murmurs his lead vocal through a ton of echo, but you can still tell that it's him. The mix includes a simple synth-preset backbeat, some nice harmonies, a few glassy synths, and the kind of breathless backup vocals that I generally associate with '80s horror movies.
Throughout, we hear the chirp of crickets. Also, the accompanying press photo has Gosling as a Frankenstein and Shields as a Wolfman, which is fun. There's a music video, too, but Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields aren't in it, or else they're hidden way in the background. (The clip also doesn't have a director's credit.) Instead, the black-and-white video follows the story of a young couple who start out in an above-ground graveyard — I can't tell if it's New Orleans or somewhere in Europe — before going on a romantic and not-especially-gothy nighttime adventure.
Our leads are Noah Jupe, who played one of the kids in the first two Quiet Place movies, and Rain Spencer, star of The Summer I Turned Pretty and the indie drama Good Girl Jane. "Lost In The Night" is out now on Anti-.
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