I quite liked – but didn’t quite love – the last Midnight record, 2022’s Let There Be Witchery, and based on the initial announcement for this follow-up, I was not alone.
According to the press release that accompanies Hellish Expectations, midway through the recording of Witchery, masked mainman Athenar decided that he wasn’t quite feeling the fire, so he challenged himself to write an entirely new Midnight album in a weekend. Though he clearly finished Let There Be Witchery and set it loose into the world – and, it should be said again, the results were worthy enough of the band’s MSPaint-scrawled logo, if not perhaps the finest example of it – now we’ve come to the final result of that creative burst.
Taken on the whole, of course, Hellish Expectations is not a significant departure from those that came before it. I mean, let’s be honest here – the differences between Midnight records are relatively minor hairs’-breadth nitpickings, and this is fundamentally still the same Motorhead-meets-Venom glorious trash-thrash bulldozer that Midnight has always been. But whereas Witchery was a slightly more midtempo outing, a little more polished, with a few out-of-the-box touches like the subtle melodic tinges of “Devil Virgin,” Hellish Expectations is the aural manifestation of the frustrations that birthed it, a leaner and meaner and even more belligerent affair, a step back towards the earliest days. It’s more compact in every manner, fast and faster and furious at every turn, and with that, the impact hits harder than any Midnight record in many a full moon. No surprises, no frills. Only Midnight.
Opening with the suitably less-than-subtle “Expect Total Hell,” Hellish Expectations delivers just that. Like the best Midnight, it’s a d-beat-driven piledriver, all punked-out thrashing riff and simple snarled hook. From there, it’s a straight shot through, twenty-six minutes of sheer maniacal merciless axe-swinging black-tinted speed metal, with huge highlights in “Slave Of The Blade,” “Nuclear Savior,” and the wonderfully accented “Mercyless Slaughtor” (emphasis on the last syllable), before closing pretty much as it began, with a standout slayer in the utterly blistering and hilariously life-… affirming? slaughTOR of “F.O.A.L.” (You know what it stands for.)
If you know Midnight, you know what this record sounds like, but Hellish Expectations pushes the lust, the filth, the sleaze, and the metal farther into the red. It’s an angrier, more energetic, more direct, more… Midnight take on Midnight than Midnight has been in a while. There’s no reason to overthink it, no reason to overanalyze it. It’s fun as hell, fast as hell, loud as hell, silly as hell, irreverent as hell, and all of those are the hellish expectations one should have when approaching it, and all the reasons you should love every second of it. No offense to the last few Midnights, but this smokes them all, all the way back to No Mercy For Mayhem, if not to Satanic Royalty, forever the band’s first impression and their greatest so far.
Expect no mercy. Expect total hell. Expect Midnight. And you’ll get it.
