James Laurent comes out of Milwaukee by way of Los Angeles, where he splits his time between building high-end sound for other people and chasing his own. He’s 25, already sitting on an RIAA Gold credit, and has engineered for major rappers and TV shows while designing Dolby Atmos rooms for studios. He’s done technical work for South Park, The Bear, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. By day he’s a media systems engineer. By night he’s in a bedroom studio making records under his own name. “Midnight Speeding” is the point where that background stops being résumé and turns into voice.
The track hits like late-night adrenaline. Big layered vocals sit right on top, pushed forward and stacked in a way that feels part alt-pop hook, part rock chorus. Underneath, you get pulsing low end, driving drums, and a glossy, high-motion feel that sits between alternative pop and commercial rock crossover. It has that energy you’d hear in a breakup scene shot through the windshield at 2 a.m., or closing credits on a teen drama where the couple finally gets in the car and floors it. That’s the lane: rush, release, no quiet.
He says it was built in one 3 a.m. sprint, lights off, headphones on. You can hear that in the writing. The topline feels immediate, almost blurted, and the hook locks in fast. There’s no drift, no long intro, no patience test. It’s built for impact, not mood-building.
Production-wise, it’s clean but not sterile. The vocal stacks hit hard and carry the chorus, while the instrumental leans into that cinematic “drive forever” feel: steady pulse, wide stereo image, everything moving forward. You can also hear the pop instincts in how it opens up without losing punch. That’s where his engineering background shows. He knows what’s going to translate in a car, in headphones, on TikTok, in a trailer.
“Midnight Speeding” is also the first real frame for his debut album, Degen Z. It doesn’t sound like a sketch or a test track. It sounds like the scene-setter. You can picture sync uses instantly: teen romance, neon skating rink, post-fight reconciliation, a training montage, any cut that needs that rush of “we’re not going home yet.”
Laurent is positioning himself as more than a guy who can sing on a beat. He’s building the record as a whole world: writing, performing, designing the artwork by hand, building the visuals in 3D tools frame by frame. That matters because the single sounds like it already belongs to its own universe. If “Midnight Speeding” is the tone setter, that album is probably built to live in film and TV as much as in streaming.
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