Sturgill Simpson is bringing back his Johnny Blue Skies moniker for a new album titled Mutiny After Midnight and an accompanying tour.
The country rocker revealed the news via a letter posted to social media, in which Simpson explained that he and his band — now billed as Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds — recorded the “album centered firmly on groove” in a Nashville studio in between their 2025 tours of the US and Western Europe.
“The majority of this band has been on the road together on and off and on again for over thirteen years. We have all grown sometimes together and sometimes apart. But we’ve never felt more ‘together’ than right now,” Simpson began. “Inspired heavily from endless hours on the bus watching old clips of the great fusion-funk band Stuff, and revisiting off-the-beaten-track concept records like Marvin Gaye’s In Our Lifetime, where, in what looks like the end of the world, the artist’s response is, ‘Let’s dance and make love.’”
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Simpson added that the songs on Mutiny After Midnight can be divided into two categories: the dark state of the world and the bright state of love. “To categorize Mutiny is tricky, but many will no doubt come with their glass ceilings to try,” he stated. “We believe the term American Music pretty much says it all. And for all the big ideas behind the Mutiny, there’s a simple goal we as a band set out to achieve: to make a dance record.”
As for the tour, he promised Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds will “take every minute the venue gives us” by performing without an opening act. “Just as I have come to see and harness my own neurodivergence and the weaponized autism of our collective members as a superpower in the studio — the same is true live,” he wrote. “We’re going out to play arenas and theaters with a vengeance.”
Mutiny After Midnight is Simpson’s second Johnny Blue Skies LP after he introduced the alias with 2024’s Passage Du Desir. That project arrived after he announced 2021’s The Ballad of Dood and Juanita would be his final album released under his own name.
— Sturgill Simpson (@johhnyblueskies) February 12, 2026
