The person who first spouted the cliché, “nothing good happens after 2 a.m.” never wrote a song worth listening to. The insomniac hours certainly offer a Weeknd album’s worth of drugs, sex, and teeth-grinding after-hours parties where you pay $7 for a lukewarm Tecate can.
But there’s also the cataleptic discomforts of 4 a.m. at home—your synapses splintering in every direction, anxiety jumping out of the gym, lonesome inspiration in its cruelest form. This is the genesis of “Dark Minnie,” the first single from Sarah Chernoff’s forthcoming Warm Nights, due this spring or summer. (The single will be available on all digital platforms this Friday)
“Dark Minnie came out of me waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep,” Sarah, a founding member of the Superhumanoids, wrote in a note. “I was not able to go back to sleep for hours and my mind wandered into weird spaces. The song is my attempt at capturing the lonely, mind spiraling nature of feeling like you are the only one up in the wee hours of the night.”
The video, premiering today on the website that you are conveniently reading, captures the crepuscular shadows that have always enveloped LA. By virtue of its design—as a place where people come to live their dreams and destroy them—the city will always exist along a sunshine/noir dialectic.
If Fleetwood Mac distilled the drugged haze of the canyons, this blends that noirish vibe with the high beam cruise of The Chromatics. There are palm tree and lanky sulfur white street lamps, LA is lit in a disjointed neon glow of slow moving cars and the no-mans land of Virgil Avenue. It’s a gorgeous song that feels eerily dislocating but strangely familiar. A recurring unshakeable dream that you’re uncertain is lucid or not.
