After moving from Sunrise through Noon and Sunset, Carter Reeves closes Surfer Girl’s ambitious four-album cycle by following the party deep into the night.
Surfer Girl have spent the last several years chasing the sun across four albums. What began with Sunrise eventually reached Noon, faded into Sunset and has now slipped into the darkness with Midnight, completing an ambitious series built around the changing moods of a single day.
For Carter Reeves, however, Midnight is more than a conceptual finish line. It is Surfer Girl’s most collaborative and stylistically adventurous album yet, folding together reggae rock, psychedelic surf music, polished pop, hip-hop and the hazy comedown that arrives after the beach party begins to burn itself out.
“There was obviously the easy visual path of Sunrise, Noon, Sunset, Midnight,” Reeves tells ThePier.org. “And it’s like, well, what’s Midnight going to sound like? What’s it going to feel like? What’s it going to smell like? What’s the whole world that we’re building with it?”
The answer is a record that moves Surfer Girl’s familiar coastal atmosphere into darker, sleeker surroundings. The sunshine and carefree energy have not disappeared, but the setting has changed. The beach party is over, the bonfire is being lit and the night still has somewhere else to go.
“Given the fact that it’s an album called Midnight, it was pretty clear that I wanted things to feel a little darker, not necessarily sonically,” Reeves says. “I mean, I think there’s definitely, we stray sonically in a bit of a darker place on some of this. But I think definitely visually, it was important to me that we were matching the midnight aesthetic, kind of that nighttime vibe.”
Where the earlier albums captured different stages of a sun-drenched day, Midnight explores what happens after everyone leaves the beach in search of more drinks, more music and another place to keep the party alive.
“At the end of the day, a beach party, which is what I like to think Surfer Girl’s music is, it does end and then people go and they get some more beers and then they grab some wood and they bring it back down to the beach and they have a bonfire,” Reeves explains. “And it’s like that’s where you’re at on this journey of this beautiful summer day. Midnight’s still ripping. Maybe you’re going to a house party or whatever it is.”
That shift gives Reeves room to expand Surfer Girl’s sound without severing the identity developed across the previous three records. Midnight moves freely between straight rap, indie pop, reggae rock and Beach Boys-inspired psychedelia, embracing sharp turns rather than flattening the album into a single mood.
“This album spans so many different kind of approaches and styles and sounds,” Reeves says. “There’s the sleek pop boy band style shit and then there’s, you know, some just straight rap. And then there’s like indie pop. And like you brought up to me before we hopped on, ‘Lagoon.’ That’s like a 1960s Beach Boys-style record. So it really is all over the place.”
The clearest example arrives near the album’s end with the two-part “Winter in New England.” The first half drifts through sleepy psychedelic surf rock before the second explodes into a grittier West Coast reggae-rock track. Reeves describes the dramatic transition as Surfer Girl’s answer to “Stairway to Heaven.”
“It starts with this sleepy, psychedelic, surf rock kind of thing that I was pulling from Khruangbin,” Reeves says. “I was pulling from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I was pulling from The Beach Boys and Frank Ocean on that intro.”
“But I knew that that song, just that intro, wasn’t going to be enough to really bring people in,” he continues. “And I knew I wanted to send it somewhere, almost like Surfer Girl’s ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Bringing it then into that second half West Coast rock reggae song with a lot of grit and a lot of attitude, I think it just showcases everything not only about what I want to do as an artist, how I want to be portrayed as an artist, but also I feel like it encapsulates what our live show is like too. We dip down and then we get super high.”
That range was made possible by opening Surfer Girl’s creative process to a larger circle. Reeves wrote much of Midnight with guitarist Jack Pavlina, while Sam Callahan played bass and Bobby Crack handled drums. After creating Surfer Girl’s earliest material largely by himself, Reeves gradually allowed collaboration to play a greater role with each album.
“The first project we ever did, it was fully self-contained, alone in a basement, pulling everything out of my brain and my ideas, which I actually genuinely love that process, but it takes a little longer,” Reeves says. “The collaboration opened up a little more on the first album, opened up a little more on the second, opened up even more on the third. And on this fourth album, Midnight, it’s definitely the most collaborative project to date.”
For Reeves, the challenge was allowing those outside voices into the room without losing his own. After years of co-writing in Los Angeles, he learned firsthand how easily an artist can disappear inside a collection of other people’s styles and preferences.
“So I think what’s really important if you’re going to co-write and you’re going to collaborate with other people, don’t collaborate so hard that you lose who you are as an artist,” he says. “You lose your voice as an artist.”
By the time work began on Midnight, Reeves had a firmer understanding of what Surfer Girl could be. The music could stretch into unfamiliar territory, but it still had to sound authentic when it came through his voice.
“I made sure that if we were writing a song together, we were writing a song that was for me, that sounded like me, that sounded like some stuff that I would like to say,” Reeves explains. “In a way that I could really use my resources around me, but make sure that the final product really felt true and authentic to who I am and what I was trying to do.”
Now that Midnight has completed the cycle, Reeves is not rushing to reveal the next concept. After four albums organized around a clear path through the day, Surfer Girl are once again facing an open horizon.
“I have no idea what comes next,” Reeves admits. “And I think that that excites the hell out of me.”
Before that next chapter arrives, Reeves intends to give Midnight the life he believes it deserves. He has watched artists spend years creating an album, promote it for a matter of days and immediately begin chasing the next release. He refuses to let Surfer Girl’s most ambitious record suffer the same fate.
“I think the biggest mistake, and people hear this all the time, is like you spill your heart and soul into an album, you spent money making it, you spent time, energy, blood, sweat, tears making it, and then you post about it for like a week and then you move on to the next thing,” Reeves says. “I’ve made that mistake in the past and I will not make that mistake with this album.”
The sun may have finally set on Surfer Girl’s four-album series, but Midnight does not feel like an ending. It sounds more like the moment the party moves somewhere new—out of the daylight, beyond the beach and into whatever comes next.
Watch the full interview with Surfer Girl:
