Night Wilds Drops Debut Single “City of Strangers”

The debut single “City of Strangers” from Seattle’s Night Wilds drops today. It is the first release from a 17-track debut Rock-opera album All That Should Have Been, which much like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, along with modern inspiration from Tool, Radiohead, and even Rage Against The Machine, blurs the line between entertainment and enlightenment.

When Night Wilds singer-songwriter Seth began writing “City of Strangers” 15 years ago, he couldn’t have known that the song would turn into the first single, but it serves as the perfect launching point for a collection of songs that reveal a deeply personal and sometimes painful story.

Regarding the creative process, it could be said that the song grew with him, as the first verse of “City of Strangers” came at a time when Seth had not yet begun the journey of recovery and sobriety.

The somber ballad starts with: Well they shut and locked the door to my cell now/And they called lights out so long ago/And I don’t think I can take this darkness anymore/All my walls are falling down. And follows with: And down that corridor I hear/Men throw themselves against steel cages/Oh God, tell me this is not what we’re living for/Oh tell me there’s more.

“The beginning of the song, which is really a sort of desperate story of this guy listening to people slam themselves against these steel cages and screaming, you know, ‘God, is this really what we’re living for? Like, this can’t be why we’re on this earth, just to slam our bodies into these cages.’ That’s the part that was written 15 years ago,” says Seth.

The track bends from the darkness into the light, just as Seth’s path into sobriety, with this ending: And brother, you’re not broken you’re just tired of the cold/And you have built the prison, and you guard the door.

“The whole end of the song was just finished a few months ago as it sort of came into focus in the whole arc of the album,” says Seth. “So with recovery, that’s where I began to realize the second half of the song.”

“City of Strangers” was tracked at Robert Lang Studios (Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Foo Fighters) and Electrokitty Studios (U2, Dave Matthews, Kendrick Lamar) with longtime Heart drummer Ben Smith and mastering and mixing engineer Tom Hall, and features a strings arrangement and performance by Yoed Nir.

After taking in the song’s musicality and lyrics, the listener is left with a message of hope and a belief that things can always get better, but first, we must venture into the darkest caves to understand that we’ve had the key to access the light all along.