Age Is An Asset on Young and Naive

Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, The Midnight Purchase has released their debut album, Young/Naïve, on Spectra Music Group. It’s their first significant release since 2019’s EP The National Sessions. Fronted by singer and songwriter Orlando Peña, the original lineup of The Midnight Purchase dates back to 2018, but the extended break that was the COVID-19 Pandemic allowed for some songwriting and retooling of the band’s sound for a new lineup.

In 2024, The Midnight Purchase recorded and mixed Young/Naïve for release in April of 2025. Young/Naïve is a chronicle of the heartbreak involved in chasing your dreams and losing love along the way. Ironically, the album is stubbornly cheerful, ruminations on aging out of lifelong goals notwithstanding. There’s a defiant optimism running through even the most somber song, “Caged Bird,” which sits dead center in the nine-song set. “Caged Bird” feels central in more than just position. In it, Peña recalls two low points at 14 and 21 of being locked up (either literally or metaphorically) while others spread their wings. “But a caged bird won’t sing as sweet/ As his brothers in the trees,” he sings. Then at 29, he describes a different point of view, trying to sing every day because he’s free. The plays out like a forecast of good things to come, and the band follows behind Peña on this emotional touchstone in ways that hold true for every other song on the album. Marshall Holm, Lee Gray, and Peña lay down a solid foundation on bass, drums, and rhythm guitar, respectively, while Jake Williams accents the progression of the song beautifully on piano and organ, and Jake Stanzer plays the album’s most emotive solo on lead guitar.

In almost every respect, the rest of the album balances on this song. The first half of the album has mostly to do with the conflict surrounding Peña’s stubborn pursuit of his musical dreams despite “gray in my hair and cramps in my hands” as he sings in “Chasing Straights.” His refusal to give up is one of the two main emotional conflicts on the album. “Too Proud,” the expansive opening number, sets the scene of Peña playing in a bar, hearing his voice echo off the back wall in what may be reckoned as “the last rites of a bitter man.” But on the chorus, he asks, “What’s so wrong in chasing a dream/ To give your life to it every day?” The question echoes in all the other songs. In “The Hard Way,” Peña fights with “kith and kin, explaining my actions for happiness,” while family just doesn’t get it. But what starts bitter morphs into introspection about why he’s always learning lessons the hard way.

If the songs on the near side of “Caged Bird” find Peña chasing an elusive dream, the songs on the far side find him chasing an elusive woman. The melancholy “Looking Ahead” finds Peña trying to look to the future but is plagued by the past. He sings, “I’m dying inside cause/ You’ve stripped all my rights/ with the things you said.” In “Asking Around,” Peña shows a familiar stubbornness when he sings, “I’ve got this plan and don’t you see?/ Gonna make you fall right into it all with me.” It’s a pleasant bit of metaphor that causes you to wonder if he’s talking to the woman or the dream from the album’s first half. In the album’s closer, “Santa Fe” (the one re-recorded holdover from The National Sessions), the woman is someone the singer was going to marry until she runs off to Hollywood to be a star. It doesn’t work out so well, though, and she ends up in Santa Fe on a stage at “Diamonds and Lace.” Now, if that isn’t dramatic irony . . .

The musical elements remain the same throughout the album, but don’t become repetitive owing to the unique character of the songs themselves. Each is a considered work that has the full buy-in of the band. If this is heartland rock and roll, Williams supports it in the best tradition of Benmont Tench (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), using piano and organ with beautiful economy. Stanzer on lead guitar is the band’s foil. He plants himself amid Peña’s melodicism with some seriously muscular playing, kind of like how those guitar players in the ’60s mingled everything with the blues. Holm and Gray make one of the best bass and drums combos I’ve heard in a while, remaining subtly inventive and enviably light on their feet throughout.

This is a great debut album. Peña and company have all the goods: songs, storytelling, musicianship, and I haven’t even mentioned Peña’s unflappable voice. If you long to hear some straight-ahead rock and roll, everything on Young/Naïve checks out.

Christopher Raley