Glasgow duo der Mist – Craig McKissick and Ali Whitty – released their second album Northern Lights on April 3rd, following early support from BBC Radio Scotland and a 2021 self-titled debut that earned them BBC Introducing airplay. Like everything they’ve made, it was written, recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely at home in Glasgow. The sonic territory this time around is a deliberate step beyond the gritty indie textures of the debut: analogue synths form the atmospheric foundation, blues guitar lines cut through with a raw human core, and a live drum feel runs throughout, keeping the whole thing grounded in something organic. The influence list – King Gizzard, Daft Punk, Prince, Depeche Mode, LCD Soundsystem – is a lot to hold together, but Northern Lights makes a convincing case for how those things can coexist without the whole record losing its identity.
This album really delivers that sense of wholesomeness and beauty implied by its title. The musical tonality is so bright yet never feels cheesy – which is a harder balance to strike than it sounds. Bright music can easily tip into saccharine, but der Mist keep it grounded with the blues and Krautrock undercurrents running beneath the surface. The palette shifts constantly across the record – from organic guitar-led blues-rock to electronic drift to full dancefloor pulse – but there’s a cohesive emotional logic to it that makes the whole thing feel like a single piece rather than a collection of stylistic experiments.
“Sea Change” is the best way to start this album. It’s a soulful blues-rock song, living on the analogue side of the spectrum with a guitar-centric rhythm section and huge-sounding acoustic drums with heavy cymbal hits. Slowly, the song introduces the electronic elements that will stay for the majority of the album, as will the impeccable melodic sense of the entire band.
“Light It Up” is another example of that fantastic gradient of colors – much like the northern lights themselves. It starts with a very simple piano arrangement but across its runtime introduces a hook played on a synthesizer, and with every repeat of the chorus, some kind of distorted vocal layer gets added, building depth and intensity as it swells and fades out.
“Northern Lights,” the title track, is the first instance of something angular on the album. The arpeggiated sequence it opens with is lopsided in a way that captures your attention immediately, but when the more stable rhythmic devices get introduced, it suddenly feels like home. In my mind, it mirrors that initial feeling of awe where something new feels foreign, then you acclimate to it. The outro is particularly great – the harmonized vocoder keeps rising dramatically in a tastefully epic way that earns the swell.
“The Depths” is the personal standout. Who doesn’t want to party on the ocean floor, in the depths where all of life began? The Daft Punk influence is strong here, but the song also – and I mean this in the best possible way – sounds like a great underwater level in a video game. It’s genuinely a blast to listen to, all the synths dialed to perfection, all the textures working together. The reason it’s so exceptional is the drumming carrying the dynamics, stopping the song from collapsing into a static EDM beat and keeping it alive and breathing all the way through.
der Mist close the album with “The End,” a cathartic ballad that frames the ending as relief rather than loss, with dramatic and epic chord changes that appropriately seal off this colorful record. But the moment the song becomes truly special is at 1:43, where the band ramps to a frenzy in perfect unison – the kind of section that would be genuinely electric to witness live. With Northern Lights building momentum for the duo and the album already earning radio support, a live run feels like the natural next move. Hopefully, it happens soon.
