Jared Hart

Jared Hart returns August 28 with The Midnight Motel, a new solo album arriving via Mt. Crushmore Records. The follow-up to his 2015 solo full-length Past Lives & Pass Lines and 2024’s The Condor EP, the record collects ten songs built around memory, loss, distance, and the strange temporary homes people pass through while trying to hold onto what is already gone.

Produced by Hart and Rob Freeman and recorded at Audio Pilot Studios in New Jersey, The Midnight Motel features a wide circle of Hart’s friends and collaborators. Ben Nichols of Lucero appears on “Ready To Go,” which also includes spoken word from poet Mischa Pearlman and backing vocals from Casey Macalush. Mercy Union’s Nick Jorgensen contributes bass on several tracks, Matt Olsson plays drums, Mark Masefield adds piano and organ, and Karen Levandoski appears on “Room Keys.”

The album’s first single, “Bridges,” is a fitting entry point: direct, worn-in, and rooted in Hart’s eye for places that shape the people who grow up inside them. Hart says the song came from growing up in a town where “if you wanted to enter or leave, you had to cross a bridge two thirds of the time,” a detail that gives the track its mix of local specificity and restless motion.

Across songs like “Tilted,” “Seafoam Green,” “Late Checkout,” and closing track “Downwhen,” Hart leans further into the autobiographical weight of his solo work while keeping the rough melodic pull that has long connected him to the New Jersey punk and alternative scene.