CHRYSTABELL

Within the very first moments of her new album Midnight Star, Chrystabell transports the listener into a dimension of her own making, a sci-fi fantasia as resplendent as her mind itself.

Chrystabell’s fifth studio album and debut release for Love Conquered Records, Midnight Star is the most visionary work yet from the Texas-based artist—a hyper-creative polymath whose past endeavors includes a series of projects with filmmaker David Lynch and a key role on Twin Peaks: The Return. This album is an enigmatic meditation on rebirth and renewal, taking its title from its lead character, a beneficent being seeking to save humanity from life on a troubled Earth. “The record is essentially the soundtrack to a glamo-futurist TV show that’s never existed,” explains Chrystabell, who names cult sci-fi films like Liquid Sky among her main touchstones for the project. “Each song is an episode, a different lifetime for Midnight Star until she comes into the full realization of her potentiality.”

Produced by her longtime collaborator Christopher Smart and recorded at Ice Cream Factory Studio in Austin, Midnight Star embodies an otherworldly sound fitting of its fantastical narrative. In dreaming up the album’s lavishly detailed collision of post-disco and synth-pop and space-age psychedelia partly inspired by the music of artists like Kraftwerk, Chrystabell deliberately strayed from the moody urgency of her past work, such as 2019’s Feels Like Love and 2017’s We Dissolve (made with producer John Parish, who’s also worked with the likes of PJ Harvey and Sparklehorse).

Midnight Star elegantly spotlights the luminous vocal presence she’s brought to the stage in headlining sold-out tours across the globe over the past decade. For Chrystabell, the making of Midnight Star represents a profound creative breakthrough that’s brought her infinitely closer to fulfilling her purpose as an artist. “It’s her hero’s journey, and my hope is that it might help others to open up to the divine, the erotic, the absurd, and everything else encapsulated in the work.”