Dead Man’s Bones Lost in the Night is the first new song in 17 years from Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields, released October 27 via ANTI- Records.
The Canadian actor and his bandmate recorded the single in a single day on a farm outside Los Angeles, and its black and white video stars Noah Jupe and Rain Spencer.
Dead Man’s Bones Lost in the Night ends a long silence
Dead Man’s Bones released their self titled debut album in October 2009 and then, as Gosling’s film career accelerated, the project went quiet. Seventeen years passed without a new song. The duo’s return arrives days before Halloween, which fits a band formed around a shared love of horror and, in particular, the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, the ride Gosling and Shields bonded over when they started the project in the mid 2000s.
The band describes the new single in its press notes as a shadowy but hopeful song about being alive and in love. The sound, per those same notes, mixes the raw, drum machine driven sound of Suicide with Bruce Springsteen’s anthemic sweep, new wave synths and post punk guitars. It is a marked shift from the lo fi, children’s choir led debut, and the shift is the story: this is not a reunion lap around the old formula, it is a new direction announced in the first track back.
Producer Tim Anderson, the longtime collaborator who also produced the 2009 debut, produced Lost in the Night. Keeping Anderson in the chair gives the comeback continuity even as the instrumentation changes, a bridge between the Silverlake Conservatory of Music children’s choir sessions that defined the first album and the synth led approach of the new single.
A cemetery, a city, and a black and white night out
The Lost in the Night video opens in a cemetery and follows Noah Jupe and Rain Spencer as they leave the graveyard behind and wander city streets together through the night. Shot in black and white, the visual plays like a short film, alternating between the pair’s perspectives and pairing the song’s romantic thread with the band’s horror roots. Jupe arrives from Hamnet and Spencer from The Summer I Turned Pretty, and casting two rising screen performers keeps the video inside the band’s film world without turning it into a celebrity cameo exercise. Gosling and Shields do not need to appear on screen for the video to feel like theirs.
The teaser campaign set the tone a week earlier. Eva Mendes helped surface the comeback on Instagram, writing about trying to summon new music from the duo, and the band’s own announcement closed with a promise that matters for anyone deciding how much to invest in a single song after 17 years.
Thanks for sticking with us all these years. New single, Lost In The Night. More coming soon.
That sign off, from the band’s Instagram post announcing the release, turns a one off Halloween single into the start of a new chapter. More coming soon is a short phrase, but after a 17 year gap it is the detail fans will hold onto.
How the song was made, in one day on a farm
The recording story explains the single’s energy. After trying several studios in Los Angeles and struggling to find the right sound, Gosling and Shields took two guitars, two drum machines and two synthesizers to a farm outside the city and tracked the song in a day with Anderson. A one day session with a deliberately small kit tends to produce direct music, and Lost in the Night has been described as starting slow and atmospheric before speeding up into a full rock song with moody post punk drums.
Context helps explain why the debut never really disappeared. In the Room Where You Sleep, from the 2009 album, has found new life in recent years as a viral sound on TikTok, introducing the band to listeners who were children when the record came out. A seasonal audience returns to Dead Man’s Bones every October, and this year that audience gets something it has never had before: a new song to add to the ritual.
For Canadian entertainment, the release is a reminder that one of the country’s biggest screen exports also has a genuine, long running music practice, not a vanity side project. Gosling, born in London, Ontario and raised in Burlington, formed this band years before the Barbie era, and returning to it now, on an independent label, with a farm recording and a cemetery video, reads as a choice made for the work itself.
Lost in the Night is streaming now via ANTI- Records, with a 12 inch vinyl edition available through the band’s official store. Dead Man’s Bones are back, and by their own account, this single is only the beginning.
