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The profile · researched 21 September 2026
Six songs at the Hollywood Bowl: the Chihuahua funk band opening for Empire of the Sun
Midnight Generation began in 2015 as Fernando Mares's one-man funk project in a border city in northern Mexico. In September 2026 the five-piece is midway through a North American amphitheatre run as the opening act on Empire of the Sun's final Ask That God tour, playing four to six songs a night before audiences who mostly do not yet know their records.
A one-man project in a border city
Fernando Mares started Midnight Generation in Chihuahua in 2015, and the name first appeared on record that year with the release Funk Your Bones. Chihuahua is a long way from Mexico City, and for roughly the first five years the project was essentially Mares alone, putting out material at a steady clip: Good Old Days in 2018, then Together and Odyssey in 2020, all issued under the band's own imprint rather than through a label.
The group that tours now assembled around 2020, when Mares brought in the four musicians he told Atwood Magazine in August 2025 he had invited five years earlier. Luis Carlos "Bica" Valderrama plays keyboards and sings backing vocals, Carlos Amaya plays bass and keyboards, Samuel Márquez plays drums and sings, and Diego Bustillos, the most recent addition, plays percussion. Mares fronts the band on vocals, keyboards and guitar.
Asked in the same interview what they are, the members named the Bee Gees, Prince and Chic. Mares was blunter about the business of being filed under a genre at all: "We don't want to win a grammy, so we don't give a fuck." The music is disco and funk played on vintage synthesisers with French-touch production, and the band has generally been described as electro-funk rather than anything to do with guitars.
Selling out rooms at home
Between 2021 and 2024 the releases kept coming — Weekends in 2021, Forever and Starlight in 2022, Afterlife in 2023, then Good Intentions and Shinin' in 2024 — and the live audience in Mexico grew ahead of any international profile. The band sold out Foro Indie Rocks, a thousand-capacity room, then Teatro Metropolitan at 2,800 and Auditorio BB at 3,200. Festival slots followed at Vive Latino, Estéreo Picnic and Corona Sunsets.
The other route out was opening for, and in some cases working with, artists whose audiences overlapped: ZHU, Sticky Fingers, Chromeo and Polo & Pan. That last name matters more now than it did at the time, because Polo & Pan are second on the bill on the tour Midnight Generation is currently opening.
None of this happened through a record company. The releases carry the band's own name as the label, with distribution handled by Altafonte.
Tender Love
Tender Love, the fourth album, arrived in April 2025: eleven tracks running just under forty-eight minutes, and by a distance the most focused thing the band had made. It was trailed by Good Intentions and Shinin' in 2024 and then by Energy, Teacher and Don't Wait Up in 2025.
Don't Wait Up did the work. It picked up millions of streams before the album was officially out and roughly doubled the band's social following inside two months, helped by a black-and-white video shot around Mexico City by Arre Productora. Mares has said since that it is the song audiences lose their heads over.
The record itself is unapologetically retro. Sidecar Junkaroo, reviewing it on release, called it "a calculated amalgamation of lethal boogie-inducing elements" and "tidy and purposeful, while boasting tangible textures and vivid colors" — disco strings and falsetto on the opener Energy, Daft Punk-adjacent production underneath, Saturday-night sequencing on Don't Wait Up, Good Intentions, Back to Love and Shinin'. It is a dance record made by a band that plays live rather than a producer's project with players added afterwards, which is the main reason the songs survive being moved onto a stage.
The world tour, and then someone else's stage
The Tender Love World Tour was produced by Live Nation and was the band's largest production to that point. It opened on 9 July 2025 at Paradiso in Amsterdam and closed on 26 October 2025 at The Ground at Club Space in Miami, with Lollapalooza dates in Berlin, Paris and Chicago, plus Outside Lands and Austin City Limits along the way. Atwood Magazine caught the Outside Lands set on 21 August 2025 and described a band that spreads out across the stage, trades unpredictable solos and drops Mario and Luigi ad-libs mid-song without losing the groove.
The 2026 plan is different in kind. On 11 March 2026 Empire of the Sun announced the Ask That God: Afterlife tour — the closing instalment of the Ask That God run behind their 2024 album — with Polo & Pan and Midnight Generation as support across the whole North American schedule. Luke Steele framed it as "a very pivotal time" for his own band: "We have a new song to sing, we have to step into a new doorway."
For Midnight Generation it means opening amphitheatres nightly from 11 August 2026 at Red Rocks through to 9 October at PH Live at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas, taking in Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on 29 August, the Mann Center in Philadelphia on 5 September, Dos Equis Pavilion in Dallas on 20 September and the Hollywood Bowl on 8 October. It is a straight trade: far bigger rooms, far shorter sets, and a crowd that arrived for somebody else.
Where the diary goes next
The support run is not the whole year. Midnight Generation played Lightning in a Bottle at Buena Vista Aquatic Recreational Area near Bakersfield on 22 May 2026, and their own tour page carries dates that sit outside the Empire of the Sun schedule: Ohana Festival at Dana Point on 25 September, Hulaween at Live Oak, Florida on 22 October, Tecate Península in Tijuana on 24 October, and two weekends of Rock the Mountain at Petrópolis in Brazil spanning 30 October to 8 November. Jam Cruise is booked for early February 2027.
That mix — US festival slots, a home-side date on the border, and a Brazilian festival the band can plausibly headline — is the interesting part of the next twelve months. The amphitheatre run converts strangers; the festival dates test whether those strangers show up when the band's name is the one on the ticket.
What has not happened yet is a follow-up to Tender Love. Eighteen months after the album, the touring calendar runs to February 2027 with no announced new record, which leaves the live show carrying the whole proposition for now.
The show, now
Right now this is an opening set, not a headline show, and it is built accordingly. Logged setlists from the Empire of the Sun run have the band playing four to six songs: six at the Mann Center in Philadelphia on 5 September 2026 (Teacher, Oh Baby What Comes Around Goes Back Around, Almost My Own, Energy, Runaways, Don't Wait Up), four at Truliant Amphitheater in Charlotte on 9 September and four at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on 17 September. Energy and Don't Wait Up appear at every show, with Don't Wait Up closing; Oh Baby What Comes Around Goes Back Around is the stretch piece, folding in snatches of Ghosts and È la mia donna. The staging is the band itself rather than production — five players each holding their own patch of the stage, trading solos that are not fixed night to night, an approach Atwood Magazine watched at Outside Lands in August 2025 and described as playful to the point of dropping Mario and Luigi ad-libs into songs. Mares has said the setlist is the hard part: "It is very difficult to choose the setlist! There is always a song that is requested that we don't play," and that Don't Wait Up is the one people go mad for. On this tour they go on first, Polo & Pan follow, and Empire of the Sun close — so the band has roughly half an hour to convert an amphitheatre crowd that largely bought tickets for someone else, which is close to what they were doing at Outside Lands, only nightly.
Researched from atwoodmagazine.com · yahoo.com · apeconcerts.com · sidecarjunkaroo.com · consequence.net · midnightgeneration.com · songkick.com · setlist.fm
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