On screen and off, San Francisco-raised countercultural explorer, Ethan Gold has sketched outlines of the lives lived by the world’s curious outliers for two decades as a musician and composer. Now, the artform-spanning Los Angeles and Berlin-based songwriter’s grasp of life and love at the margins is written large over The Inhibitionists, the latest, pulsating single to be drawn from his third, meticulously assembled solo album, Earth City 2: Nightfolk.
Gathering effusive critical words for his 2017 solo debut album, Songs From a Toxic Apartment, Gold’s working life as a diviner of emotive sound stretches back to the first of his five Hollywood soundtracks in 2010, cementing the cornerstone of a life in film that continues in the present. Simultaneous to working towards the release of the second of his Earth City albums, following 2021’s Earth City 1: The Longing, the songwriter and his brother, Ari, have been scooping up plaudits around festival screenings of their latest film, Brother Verses Brother where Ethan is lead actor, songwriter, and composer.
Establishing cultural terrain for society’s inquisitive outsiders, Gold’s storytelling on The Inhibitionists is a billboard-sized advertisement for the purposely smallest and most interesting of lives. Written and recorded between studio set-ups in Nashville, Glasgow and rural Scotland, the single follows a series of warm-up leak-releases, including the Talking Heads-a-like new-wave pop of I’m In The Moon and the mid-century psych-jangle of Camera.
“’The Inhibitionists’ is about the thrill of the city under moonlight with another introverted, nervous person,” reveals Gold. “The world is loud with exhibitionists who don’t understand our way of making magic, and we don’t care. I wrote the song inspired by a secret affair. We’d sneak around the strange areas of Los Angeles at night, and make the polluted fields and industrial wastelands our playground.”
Joining the dots and overlapping his creative spheres, Ethan directed a music video for The Inhibitionists between the cracks of eastern Berlin’s buzzy nightlife and Görlitzer Park’s cold war relics, which is to be shown at the Berlin Music Video Awards. Gathering good friends and dodging the city’s darkness-dwelling undesirables, the video hits the big screen at next months’ festival, held in the city between Thu 12- Sat 14 June 2025.
Set for release on Fri 26 September 2025, Earth City 2: Nightfolk is described by Gold as an album of “nervous, romantic anthems, moody journeys of loss, and stories of the introverts stepping from their shells in the night across the globe.” Songs of subways and trains, sex and solitude, the songwriter’s determined and distinct vision of not two, but three, connected albums will take him and his listeners to an, as yet unannounced, Earth City 3, in the future.
Becoming available through all streaming services alongside physical vinyl and CD releases in the UK and internationally in the autumn, Gold has confirmed the track listing for Earth City 2: Nightfolk as follows: