Midland Artist Bio

Midland is the name of more than one artist:
1) Country music group from Dripping Springs Texas.
2) Harry Agius, DJ, Producer and record label owner from London, UK.

1) Midland is a country music group formed in 2014 in Dripping Springs, Texas. They have released three studio albums, On the Rocks, Let It Roll and The Last Resort: Greetings From, which have accounted for seven charted singles on the Billboard country chart: “Drinkin’ Problem”, Burn Out”, “Make a Little”, “Mr. Lonely”, “Cheatin’ Songs”, “Sunrise Tells the Story” and “Longneck Way to Go”. Midland’s musical style is known as neotraditional country.

The trio met separately around Los Angeles, where Jess Carson and Cameron Duddy were in a number of bands through a number of years. After Carson left L.A., Duddy and Mark Wystrach met and formed a country-rock band called The Young Whiskey. The trio met up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for Duddy’s wedding in August 2013; both Wystrach and Carson acted as groomsmen. As Duddy recalls the story, Carson and Wystrach arrived in Jackson Hole for the wedding a week early. After playing songs together on the front porch of Carson’s cabin, they proposed starting a project together. Six months later, in January 2014, Duddy called Carson and Wystrach to suggest that they record some songs, and they went to the Sonic Ranch recording studio in El Paso, TX to record for 10 days. As stated by Wystrach, “when we went to the Sonic Ranch, we became a band. We walked away believing in what had happened.” Wystrach and Duddy then both moved with their families to Texas where Carson lived. They decided to name the band after a song by musician Dwight Yoakam called “Fair to Midland”. The trio has a definitive sound.

Mark Wystrach grew up surrounded by music as his parents were both fans of live music. His parents owned a country music venue. In addition to being a singer, Wystrach is also an actor and model. Wystrach was signed to IMG Models as a model. Jess Carson grew up on a farm in Oregon where the main genre was country music. His sister and father were both musicians, so he started playing guitar. Cameron Duddy started playing music after a difficult situation in his family; he found that music helped to lessen the tension, saying, “Sometimes you don’t get to talk about all the things that you maybe want to talk about and the ice breaker started to be music.” He got his first guitar from his father; it helped him to find his identity. Duddy is also a music video director; he won an MTV Video Music Award for the video “Locked Out of Heaven” by Bruno Mars.

Midland’s first song, “Fourteen Gears”, was around 2015. The song, according to Duddy, was “another one of the early moments that defined and solidified the band.”

On March 9, 2016, the trio signed to Big Machine Records and released the Midland EP featuring their debut single, “Drinkin’ Problem”, which charted on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay. The band wrote the song with Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, the former of whom also produced it. Duddy directed the song’s music video. Their debut album On the Rocks was released in September 22, 2017, produced by Dann Huff, Josh Osborne, Shane McAnally. Midland released “Make a Little” as the second single. “Burn Out” as the third single, it was released in late 2018.

Midland was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 2018: Grammy Award for Best Country Song and Grammy Award for Best Country Duo/Group Performance, both for “Drinkin’ Problem”. Midland won at the 2018 ACM Awards for best New Vocal Group of the year. Midland released the single “Mr. Lonely” in February 2019 as the leadoff single to their second album. Midland released “Cheatin’ Songs” in August of 2019 as the second single to the album. The album, Let It Roll, was released on August 23, 2019. The band began a tour in June in support of the album. In February of 2020 Midland launched three expressions of their own brand of tequila, called “insõlito”.

In March 2021, Midland released an album titled The Sonic Ranch, which served as the soundtrack for the documentary film on their origin story, focusing on their first recording session at The Sonic Ranch in 2014. On July 16, 2021, Midland released their latest EP, The Last Resort, which hit Number 47 on the Billboard Album Sales Chart. The band followed the EP with their third studio album titled The Last Resort: Greetings From, released on May 6, 2022. They released “Sunrise Tells the Story” as the first single, and the second single was released in late 2022 titled “Longneck Way to Go”, with Jon Pardi.

2) London based producer Harry Agius started Djing whilst at university in Leeds, his alias Midland is reference to the road he lived on whilst a student. It was in Leeds where he started playing club nights Momentum, Metropolis and Subdub, playing on the Valve Soundsystem warming up for DJs such as Grooverider, Andy C and Dillinja.

Living in Leeds after University, he met likeminded producers and DJs like Pearson Sound, Ben UFO and Pangaea and attended nights such as Exodus, Subdub, Louche, and Back to Basics – which shifted his interest toward slower tempos.

Agius founded his label “Graded” in 2013 in order to release his own productions. In 2015 he founded the sublabel “Regraded” to release mroe house and disco based music from artists such as Gerd Janson and Hubie Davison alongside his own work.

In February 2016 Midland made his contribution to the hugely influential BBC Essential Mix series. The end of the mix came in the shape of an unreleased track that would go on to soundtrack dance floors and festivals the world over. That track was ‘Final Credits.’ The Mix won Essential mix of the year, and Final Credits won Mixmag’s 2016 song of the year. As a touring DJ Agius has played at the world’s best clubs and biggest festivals, from Berghain’s Panorama Bar to Glastonbury and Dekmantel.

Agius is an advocate of LGBTQ+ rights and culture, his 2024 album Fragments of Us has various samples relating to the persecution of the LGBTQ+ community. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.