Dead Man’s Bones, the musical partnership of Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields and everyone’s favourite Halloween band, is back after seventeen years of silence. The duo released a new track, “Lost In The Night,” on ANTI- Records this week, their first new music since their self-titled debut earned critical praise in 2009.
The song arrives with a music video starring Noah Jupe and Rain Spencer, who play a pair of young lovers leaving a cemetery behind for the lamplit streets of the city. What starts in the world of the dead turns into a romantic chase through the world of the living, trading the mood of the graveyard for a nervy, lovestruck energy that made the band’s debut such an odd, enduring object in the first place.
Produced with longtime collaborator Tim Anderson, “Lost In The Night” mixes drum machine clatter with Bruce Springsteen style widescreen sweep, new wave synths, and post punk guitar. Gosling and Shields have said they tried several Los Angeles studios without finding the sound they wanted, then packed two guitars, two drum machines, and two synthesizers off to a farm outside the city and cut the track in a single day. The result is scrappier and more homemade than the 2009 record, and it hints at a different direction for the band going forward.
Shields has also kept busy on the screenwriting side, most recently signing on to write Gladys, the Weapons prequel he developed with Zach Cregger, alongside past writing and producing credits on Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, plus the play Dad’s Leg, which he wrote and directed.
Recorded with the Silverlake Conservatory Children’s Choir, the band’s 2009 self-titled debut folded gothic folk, vintage rock and roll, and doo-wop into a half remembered Halloween record, eerie and playful all at once. Nearly two decades on, the record has only grown its cult following, turning up regularly in film and television and continuing to pull in new listeners who were not yet born when it came out.
Watch the video below.
