Neko Case Shares Focus Track For New Album Out Friday

The GRAMMY-nominated iconoclast Neko Case is releasing her highly anticipated new studio album Neon Grey Midnight Green this Friday via Anti- Records. “It’s an album that blossoms with awe,” Pitchfork beautifully described in a new interview. “Soundtracking Case’s words are windswept arrangements and contagious melodies where baritone guitar, violin swells, and steady percussion crumple up feelings of dread and anxiety.” Case shares the sprawling highlight ‘Rusty Mountain,’ where the heart of the record seems to live and she declares: “We all deserve better than some love song.”

Plagued with a sort of intuition about death, Case penned the piano epic about two years before Romweber’s 2024 passing when she found herself worrying about him. As Case wrote in her recent memoir The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, the first time she heard Romweber’s pioneering psychobilly group, “something unlocked in her that day, the way making music could become a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy inside of her body.” She called it “not a romantic love, but an all-consuming one”—a common thread across her memoir and her new album.

Arriving September 26, Neon Grey Midnight Green’ is Case’s first new music this decade, following 2018’s Hell-On, an eclectic piece that The Guardian called “a pitch-perfect roar of female defiance.” Her latest is no less urgent but carries a deep blue streak of sentimentality in its incandescent blaze. More than any of her past albums, Neon Grey Midnight Green was laid down live with a full band – even breaths and shirt-sleeve rustlings were kept in the final mix as a reminder that “humans were here.” Recording primarily took place at Case’s own Vermont studio, Carnassial Sound, with additional sessions in Denver, Colorado with the PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra and in Portland, Oregon with Tucker Martine.

“There are so few producers who are women, nonbinary, or trans,” says Case, who identifies as gender fluid and uses she/her pronouns. “People don’t think of us as an option. I’m proud to say I produced this record. It is my vision. It is my veto power. It is my taste.”

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