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May 23, 2022 By Joey Arnone

Nightlands (the solo project of The War on Drugs’ Dave Hartley) has shared a video for his new song “No Kiss For The Lonely.” It is the latest release from his forthcoming studio album, Moonshine, which will be out on July 15 via Western Vinyl. View the Michael Flanagan-directed video below.

Hartley states in a press release: “‘No Kiss for the Lonely’ is the first song I started working on for this album, even before the birth of my daughter, Hazy, who is about to turn four. So, it’s a song that’s been kicking around in my brain for a while. The whole record was done very solitarily, partially due to the pandemic but also because of my new lifestyle as a father and musician. You have to find new ways to carve out time to create when you have the needs of children to consider.

“But ‘No Kiss’ is actually a pretty collaborative track. A lot of happenstance connections helped it come into being. A borrowed synth (Robbie Bennett’s Akai AX60), a synth bass part (played by Severin Tucker), a gifted effects processor (an Eventide H9 from Anthony Agnello), a drum loop (played by Eric Slick and inspired by Seth Kaufman), and hugely thick vocal stacks (sung by myself, Eliza Hardy Jones, Anthony LaMarca, Jesse Hale Moore and Michael Kiley) all fell together to create this song out of thin air. I’m a firm believer that the best lyrics come with no interference from the brain’s cognitive capacities. They just tumble out with the meaning to be parsed later. This song was definitely an example of that. The lyrics came all at once and capture a lot of the exasperation and anger I feel when I read the news.”

Director Flanagan adds: “Listening to the song gave me a really expansive sense of space and color, but also a longing, melancholy feeling. The idea I had was more of an emotional reaction to that, rather than something deeply conceptual. I wanted to show those contrasting feelings in a lost character wandering through seemingly endless sand dunes.”

Upon announcement of the new album back in April, Hartley shared the title track, “Moonshine.”

Hartley’s last solo album, I Can Feel the Night Around Me, came out in 2017 via Western Vinyl.

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