Patrick Hynes’ new single, “Baby’s High Again,” doesn’t so much arrive as materialize, like a half-remembered scent of bourbon and regret clinging to a velvet curtain. This “Midnight Country” he’s cultivating, it’s less dusty plains, more the blue, flickering light of a motel television at 3 AM, illuminating a room where decisions have been made, then unmade, then made again. Hynes, a Scot with a Texan drawl in his musical soul, crafts a narrative loop so hypnotic it’s almost a dare to break free.
The track pulls you into its woozy orbit of what feels like substance-shadowed emotion, where “high” is a fraught sanctuary, a place revisited with the grim inevitability of a tide. At its core writhes a complicated, perhaps destructive, love – possibly with a best friend, now more like a co-conspirator in emotional chaos. It’s all fractured perception and a desperate, grasping intimacy, a bond that flickers between fated and fatal. You know, it’s a bit like those strange medieval dances, the danse macabre, where everyone’s whirling with Death, but here, it’s a different kind of oblivion they’re dancing towards, hand in aching hand.
This isn’t your grandpappy’s porch-swing Americana. Hynes’ rich pop textures lend a cinematic, almost bruised quality to the classic storytelling. It’s a sound that feels simultaneously raw and glossily produced, like a beautifully shot film about people making beautiful messes. “Midnight Country” indeed – it’s the soundtrack for when love and loss blur into one long, disorienting night, where euphoria always seems to have a comedown baked into its DNA.
“Baby’s High Again” doesn’t offer solutions, nor does it judge. It just holds up a cracked mirror to a cycle of breakdown and intense, fleeting connection. One finds oneself wondering, not if they’ll escape, but what part of themselves they’ll leave behind when the lights finally come up.
