After years of social media silence, the man who once dubbed himself “Dick Daddy” and now goes by Johnny Blue Skies is terminally online on par with Gen Z. The artist formerly known as Sturgill Simpson had a busy day on the socials on Friday, sharing a 30-second teaser of his physical-only album, Mutiny After Midnight, as well as a scavenger hunt to find advance release copies of the LP, out March 13th.
Among his usual barrage of memes, the official Johnny Blue Skies account shared a GIF of a headbanging He-Man. Turn on the sound, and you’ll hear a greasy groove built on simplicity. A basic kick, snare, cymbal beat links with a pair of filtered guitar notes, then a slide, and then layers and layers of wrist-funk guitar riffs until it all comes back to one. It’s a hypnotizing loop perfectly in line with Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds’ stated mission, “to make an album centered firmly on groove.”
“You can break down the songs on this album into two categories—the dark state of the world and the bright state of love,” Simpson wrote in the lengthy album announcement/artistic manifesto. “Light lives in darkness just as darkness lives in light. I have come to find over time that it’s far easier to just embrace contradictions rather than attempting to resolve them.”
In his album announcement, Simpson—who adopted the name Johnny Blue Skies in 2024 for the release of the beautiful Passage du Desir—revealed that his second JBS album will be “available on vinyl, CD, and cassette only.” So, as long as everyone is cool and doesn’t upload MP3s of the physical album to the internet, the clip shared on Friday could be some of the only Mutiny After Midnight music ever available online.
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With that physical-only distribution commitment in mind, it was especially tantalizing when Simpson announced a scavenger hunt for the album. That same Friday afternoon, shortly before sharing the audio teaser, the JBS Instagram posted Sturgill’s Navy photo with the caption, “!!!!TREASURE HUNT ALERT!!!! 10 copies on shelves at your local Record shop in select markets….run bitches. IM THE CAPTAIN NOW.”
Fans across the country set out on an It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World-style dash to their local independent record stores, likely frustrating untold numbers of employees who had to field excited phone calls all afternoon. According to a post in the JBS/SS fans Facebook group, fortunate fans tracked down elusive copies at stores in Denver, Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Portland, OR. The rest of us will just have to wait.
Pre-order Sturgill Simpson/Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds’ Mutiny After Midnight here on multi-colored vinyl, CD, and cassette. Read more about the album here.
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