Full disclosure: I love The Midnight. Their music sounds like the 1980s as I like to remember it, rather than as the decade actually was: all neon sunsets, cinematic night drives and bittersweet summer romances, with most of the beige bits carefully edited out.
It’s nostalgia for an idealised past, a past that probably never existed outside music videos, arcade games and our increasingly unreliable memories.
So, when The Midnight puts its striped sunset logo onto a modern cassette player and bundles it with a limited-edition tape, I’m embarrassingly easy to sell to.
That is precisely what We Are Rewind has done with its latest version of the WE-001 portable cassette player.
Created in collaboration with The Midnight, the limited-edition model transforms the player’s circular cassette window into the striped sunset you’ll associate with the band — and synthwave culture generally.
It also comes with a Purple Swirl cassette edition of Syndicate, The Midnight’s latest album. Yes, that means physically putting an album into a machine, pressing a reassuringly substantial button and listening in the order the artists intended.
A modern cassette player?
The WE-001 promises to deliver the cassette experience without forcing owners to search eBay for a battered Walkman held together by optimism and rubber bands.
It has a built-in rechargeable battery offering up to 12 hours of playback, Bluetooth 5.1 for connecting wireless headphones or speakers, and a conventional 3.5mm headphone socket.
There are proper forward and rewind controls, while a line input lets owners record their own mixtapes. The specs list a frequency response that stretches from 30Hz to 14,500Hz, although anyone expecting cassettes to challenge modern lossless digital audio may have misunderstood the assignment.
This isn’t about bleeding-edge audio fidelity, but ritual and nostalgia. Streaming “Sunset” from your phone is convenient, but sliding a plastic tape of it into a physical player while pretending you’re driving through Los Angeles in 1987 is something else entirely.
The Midnight describes its music as a form of time machine, drawing on the technology and atmosphere its members grew up with. “We Are Rewind is a time machine too,” said Tim McEwan and Tyler Lyle. “We’re proud to collaborate on this special edition.”
The finished player looks as though it could have dropped out of the “Shadowverse”, but it brings enough modern technology to avoid becoming purely decorative.
So how much is The Midnight cassette player?
The limited-edition We Are Rewind x The Midnight WE-001 costs £159 and goes on sale directly through We Are Rewind
on 1 October.
That is undeniably a lot of money for a cassette player when virtually every song ever recorded is already waiting inside your phone.
But vinyl sales didn’t recover because records are easier than Spotify, and nobody buys a cassette because repeatedly pressing fast-forward is the most efficient way to reach their favourite track.
With summer’s ending soon (see what I did there? No? Ok…) and the darker evenings approaching, this might be the perfect time to embrace some gloriously unnecessary analogue nostalgia.
Now, where did I leave that box of C90s?
He is the founder of Huff Media, publisher of Professional Pickup, Professional Van, Average Janes, Average Joes, and CALIBRE. His work focuses primarily on light commercial vehicles, pickups, and real-world vehicle use, with much of his time spent on manufacturer launches, industry events, and long-term vehicle testing.
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