Midnight Generation Turned Life on the Road Into a Reflection on Home With New Album Rooted

The dog days of summer found Midnight Generation making their way across the American Midwest, sharing stages with Empire of the Sun and Polo & Pan on a North American tour. Somewhere near Chicago, Fernando Mares, the Mexican disco-funk band’s frontman, stumbled upon a vocoder, an instrument that can give the human voice a robotic, synthesizer-like sound, for sale on Facebook Marketplace. At the time, touring was only part of the band’s workload. Between shows, the Chihuahua-born quintet had also been busy recording Rooted, their new album. Rather than spending weeks in a studio, they were making music wherever they could, turning temporary accommodations into makeshift recording spaces and finding inspiration in the experiences they accumulated along the way. Find Midnight Generation Tickets Here So when Mares came across the vocoder, he decided to give it a try. The band was approaching the deadline to deliver “Premium Delivery,” a track they were working on for the album, and the instrument sounded so good that they incorporated it into the song as a last-minute solo. “The challenge was to make the most of what we had at that moment,” Mares tells Consequence Latino. The circ...