Drakulas Unveil “Midnight City” Album

Austin, TX’s synth-punk lifers Drakulas have returned with Midnight City, their third full-length that is out today via Dirtnap Records in the US and Wild Honey Records in Europe. Built from proto-punk grit, garage rock urgency, and the synthetic pulse of early new wave, the record pulls from the worlds of Devo, Gary Numan, Grauzone, Kraftwerk, and the weirder edges of Neue Deutsche Welle, landing in a tight, off-kilter pocket where jagged guitars and cold synth lines push against each other without ever settling. It plays like a lost transmission from a strip mall arcade in 1982. Not nostalgia, not revival, more like something unearthed and reassembled, flickering but fully alive.

Formed by Savage Lord Mic, Sam Francisco, and Pink Rick, with members of Riverboat Gamblers and Rise Against, Drakulas began as a conceptual project but quickly took on a life of its own. The band operates inside a fictionalized late-70s metropolis, a stylized world built from analog textures, early video-era aesthetics, and a long-running interest in character-driven songwriting. Over time, that concept has sharpened into something more cohesive, less of a backdrop and more of a system the band fully inhabits. What started as an experiment is now a fully realized lane. Drakulas aren’t orbiting their other projects anymore, they’ve carved out their own space, with a sound and identity that continues to sharpen with each release. Midnight City is their most complete statement yet. Focused, strange, and fully committed to its own logic. The signal is clearer now, but the world it’s coming from is still just out of reach.

“We Drakulas continue to evolve our sonic mastery of lo-fi instrumentation. Midnight City is the result of a dirty basement, menthol cigarettes and the warm glow of a cathode ray TV. We spilled kerosene on the keyboards to make them sound uglier. Not for squares.”