18 August 6-12, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents ▼ DENTON BANDS IT’S MIDNIGHT SOMEWHERE ON THEIR BRAND NEW RECORD, DENTON’S DRAKULAS BUILT A NEON UNDERWORLD CALLED ‘MIDNIGHT CITY.’ BY PRESTON BARTA M ike Wiebe has spent a career throwing his body into rooms full of people. As the frontman of the Riverboat Gamblers, he’s swung from raf- ters and collapsed a lung while crowd-surf- ing. It says something that his most dangerous work right now happens inside a made-up city that never existed. That city is “Midnight City,” the third LP from his art-punk outfit Drakulas, out this summer. It’s 12 tracks of proto-punk snarl, ga- rage grime, humming ‘80s synths and a new- wave cool that feels like it crawled out of a busted VHS tape and decided to start trouble. . Denton made him do it Before settling in Austin, and before the Gamblers hit soundtracks and stages across the country, there was Denton. Wiebe was born there and stayed until around 2001, coming up in a scene he remembers as glori- ously unbothered by ambition. “It was so collaborative,” he says to the Observer about the late-’90s Denton world. Back then, music education happened in living rooms and basements at house shows. Underground spaces were places where you could rack up performance hours before you ever had to think about anything as grim as business. He calls Denton a “micro-Austin” — a small city with an outsized creative pulse, the kind of place that allows young musi- cians to be bad before they get good. That’s where the Riverboat Gamblers learned to be a band worth watching. Dallas was where the Gamblers first ven- tured out. Early club shows in Dallas were the band’s first taste of playing beyond the immediate comfort of home — the first out -of-town city where they tested songs with a crowd that hadn’t watched them stumble through a friend’s living room the week be- fore. Denton grew them. Dallas gave them their first real audience past the county line. By the early 2000s, Wiebe moved to Austin, chasing regular club shows, inde- pendent movie theaters and the easy access to comedy clubs. But North Texas never fully let go, and neither did he. Building a city out of childhood static “Midnight City” isn’t set in Denton, or Dallas, or Austin. It’s set somewhere stranger — a fictionalized late ‘70s, early ‘80s metropo- lis rendered with the slightly cartoonish awe of a suburban Texas kid who only knew big cities through the glow of television. “[Midnight City] is a big city the way I imagined one growing up,” Wiebe says, and you can hear his childlike wonder curdling into something seedier across the record. It’s a place of arcade light, cheap thrills and occult whispers. Put together, they form a world that’s dirty, funny, glamorous and faintly threatening all at once — a place that sounds like Sisters of Mercy and Devo got stuck in the same elevator. Part of why “Midnight City” feels so fully realized comes down to how it was made. Earlier Drakulas records were tracked live with the whole band in a room. This latest release was built from home demos that Wiebe and co-writer Zach Blair pieced to- gether during the pandemic. That shift cracked something open. Work- ing demo-first gave them space to experi- ment with synth textures and studio trickery, layering the neon glow that gives the record its after-dark shimmer. The result is catchier, weirder and more confident — the sound of a band that has stopped defining itself and sim- ply moved into the world it built. Only the lines that stick stay Wiebe’s method for writing lyrics is its own small act of faith. He’ll write a song, set it aside for a few days, then try to rewrite the whole thing from memory without peeking at the original draft. Whatever survives that gap is what he ultimately keeps. The logic is simple: the lines you can’t forget are the ones that were vivid enough to earn their place. Nothing feels padded, and everything feels remembered. Then there’s the matter of the profanity, which Wiebe wields like a man who knows exactly what he’s doing. His stand-up com- edy background taught him to treat swear words as “power words” to be deployed se- lectively, for maximum impact, never tacked on for cheap maturity. When a word drops in a Drakulas song (like in “Head in the Clouds”), it hits because he saved it for the moment that needed it. A gang of stage names Drakulas is, by design, a costume. Wiebe treats fronting the band as acting, slipping into personas that keep the project a world apart from his other work. On record, the band lists both real names and character names. Wiebe becomes “Savage Lord Mic.” Blair — a veteran of Rise Against, Gwar and more — becomes “Pink Rick.” Rounding out the crew is drummer Sam Kier, also of the Riverboat Gamblers, who is a “metronome-perfect” player who elevates the demos into something spring-loaded, plus live members Ian McDougall on bass and Eric Turner on guitar. Together they turn a studio fantasy into a room-shaking reality. There’s a poetry to where this record comes to rest. Wiebe spent his youth logging hours in Denton basements, playing to friends and strangers, learning what a room feels like when it tips toward chaos. Now he returns as Savage Lord Mic, dragging an en- tire imaginary city behind him “Midnight City” is available on streaming services now. ▼ LOCAL BANDS NOT SO SOFT ROCK SOFTLY IS REWRITING THE PLAYBOOK FOR ROCK MUSIC IN NORTH TEXAS BY TURNING HEARTBREAK INTO GORGEOUSLY CRUNCHY HOOKS. BY PRESTON BARTA S ome bands arrive with a marching band and a press release the size of a phone book. Softly showed up qui- etly, which is either a cruel irony or the whole point. Here’s the thing about the Dallas-Fort Worth rock scene: it rewards the patient, the stubborn and the genuinely good. Softly is all three. And after spending an afternoon with Isaac Chavez and Harrison Castleberry, we’re ready to say something a music writer isn’t supposed to say without a hedge or a foot- note: This might be the most exciting rock band to come out of North Texas in years. Big claim. Allow us to back it up. A band before the band Softly didn’t spring fully formed from a garage. The story starts in elementary school, where Chavez and Castleberry first met and eventually competed together in classical guitar competitions. By high school, they were spending a weekly passion project period the way most kids spent study hall, except instead of homework, they were building something. Years of playing under a different name followed, including a prior project with a dif- ferent lineup and a different feel. After about three years on that path, something shifted. “We wanted to start something fresh and new with just us,” Castleberry says. So, they did. They rebuilt themselves as Softly around the start of 2024. There’s something honest about a band willing to bury its first act. Plenty of musicians cling to a name long after the music has moved on. These two took the harder challenge — they let the project go, kept the friendship and rebuilt from the studs. The change of direction was more of a reckoning than it was a rebrand. What emerged was leaner and more sure of itself. Chavez stepped to the front with vocals and bass for the low-end anchor that gives the songs their heartbeat. Castleberry handled guitar and production, shaping the sound twice, once on the strings and once at the board. Rounding out the trio, Rafael Iba- nez adds a second guitar tone that fills out the band’s sonic footprint and gives Castle- berry the freedom to push the instrumenta- tion further. And because Castleberry doesn’t sing lead, he’s found another way in. “I try to express my emotions and feelings ▼ Music Cecilia Mireles Three sharp-dressed emissaries (Mike Wiebe, center) from a city that only exists after midnight.
