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Photo: Hama Sanders
Dead Man's Bones dropped "Lost In The Night," their first new music in 17 years, and the song arrived with a black-and-white video made for it. The duo is Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields. Gosling sings and plays the keys, guitar and bass, and Shields plays guitar and percussion. Gosling's 10-track debut solo album came out in 2000, and he and Shields formed the band together, their only record to date being the self-titled debut from 2009.
The single came out on October 27 through ANTI- Records, and it was made away from any studio. After several Los Angeles rooms had failed to give them the sound they wanted, the pair took two guitars, two drum machines and two synthesizers to a farm outside the city and recorded it in a day, with their longtime producer Tim Anderson behind the desk.
Noah Jupe and Rain Spencer play a couple who leave a cemetery and wander through the city streets at night, laughing, hugging and staring at each other as if they were the only two people left on Earth. The return had been teased on Instagram the week before, and Gosling's wife, the actress Eva Mendes, pushed it along with her own posts, including a repost of the band's teaser in which she wrote, "He came through on this promise to me."
Gosling and Shields built a strange, theatrical kind of music out of gothic folk, vintage rock and roll and doo-wop, and the record they made with the Silverlake Conservatory Children's Choir came out eerie, playful and nostalgic at the same time, like something out of an old horror film. Gosling has spent the years since writing and producing films, among them the weapons prequel Gladys, and he wrote and directed the play Dad's Leg.
The track opens on an eerie guitar clang, then quickly picks up the pace into raw post-punk that never lets up. It revs up midway through on a spare, driving beat reminiscent of the 1970s synth-punk pioneers Suicide, with a chorus of echoey background vocals, and Gosling and Shields wrote the song themselves. The band calls the result a shadowy but undeniably hopeful homemade anthem.
The lyrics include the line Gosling sings, "Shadows growing longer in your dust, the darkest dawn is on the rise for us, chase it all away." The years between the two albums were not empty. Covers, among them Cat Power's version of "Pa Pa Power," film and television syncs, and a seasonal bump from listeners playing the band every October kept the group in circulation. What has not come back is a record. The band has said nothing about an album, and for now the single stands on its own, arriving in time for Halloween with no second date behind it.
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