Ethan Gold’s “The Inhibitionists” Is an Anthem for the Romantic Outsiders

Ethan Gold’s “The Inhibitionists” feels like wandering through a European dreamscape with a secret lover and a head full of poetry. It’s the kind of track that slips under your skin and makes you want to stay up all night, wandering, wondering, and feeling deeply human.

Drawn from his upcoming EARTH CITY 2: NIGHTFOLK, the song is a love letter to introversion and nocturnal life, sparked by Gold’s time immersed in Berlin’s creative undercurrent. If the first installment of the trilogy introduced Earth City as a concept, this one takes you into its quietest corners filled with moonlit misfits, wistful barbacks, and dreamy-eyed drifters.

Musically, “The Inhibitionists” is soft-spoken yet rich in tone. Acoustic strums blend into a pulsing synth beat, while Gold’s low, velvety vocals gently guide the listener into a hidden after-hours world. There’s a gentle defiance here, an insistence that beauty doesn’t need to shout to be seen. It exists in the subtle, the slow burn, the eye contact across dimly lit rooms.

Lyrically, Gold taps into a shared craving for intimacy and authenticity. The song’s message is clear: You don’t need to be loud to be alive. You don’t need to perform to be real. There’s power in quiet connection, and sometimes shedding inhibition means simply existing as yourself without apology.

The video, set in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, paints that narrative with warmth and nostalgia. It’s not about escaping reality but finding freedom within it, dancing softly through the city’s alleys, bars, and subways, unbothered and wide-eyed.

Gold invites listeners into a space where daydreamers reign supreme at night. With “The Inhibitionists,” he offers a welcome sanctuary for those who crave meaning in a world that often rewards noise. It’s a song for the lovers, the loners, and the late-night wanderers. And it hits exactly where it’s meant to.

How did your time in Berlin influence the sound and spirit of "The Inhibitionists"?

"The Inhibitionists" was written in Los Angeles, inspired in part by a love affair that had us meeting late, exploring the far reaches of the city in what Louis Cole calls "the weird part of the night". There's a different kind of romance to cities in the strange hours after 2am, when the distances shrink but the mystery expands. Both of these because you're alone out there. 

Berlin is obviously known as a late-night city, and this second part of my Earth City trilogy of albums, which I'm pre-releasing a bunch of singles from now, is stories about the nighttime and the people who live in that time zone in cities across the world. When I finished the song, I was living in Berlin and trying somewhat unsuccessfully to find an alternative to the club life. I directed the video over a long summer night, starting on the streets around Görlitzer Park, where we had to move quickly to avoid the dealers. We then headed to a cafe-like bar where I often performed, and I gave a mini performance. Afterwards, we hit the streets of Kreuzberg again, where the U-Bahn runs above ground, which feels like some metaphor for the energy I was trying to capture.  I cast two pals from my favorite music bar, both of whom are singer-songwriters, to play my life in another city. In contrast, I played the kind of introverted observer who gets himself into those situations in the first place.

You talk about introversion as a kind of magic. How do you express that musically?

Being a loner gets a bad rap. It's a superpower to be self-reliant, not just to be able to feed one's body, but to be able to feed one's life with imagination. I express introversion in my lyrics, certainly. I'm standing up for all the people who know that this ability to be alone is the flip side of having a rich inner life. We don't need others as much. And introversion is also expressed through the details in my music. "The Inhibitionists" has layers of instruments — percussion, two drum sets, multiple acoustic guitars, electric guitars, synths, vocals, but they all interlock and appear and disappear in a way that should feel organic, like a brain chugging along through thoughts, and ideally uncluttered even though it's busy.  This love of detail is related to sensitivity and introversion. People who love loudness and crowds probably love music with fewer layers. And I find most pop music now is basically three layers - chordal loops, rhythm track, and vocal. So in some way, I think my approach to arranging is introverted, even though this song has a lot of energy. We aren't all shrinking violets.

What role does place play in the Earth City trilogy, especially in this second installment?

Earth City 2 is the nightlife record. Earth City 1 was the longing side of aloneness.  This upcoming record should feel, for sensitive people, for sensitive instruments — literally — like the interlocking life within and between cities. The trains, the subways, the people, pulsing quietly through the night.  So it's an 'urban' record, but not in the way radio programmers have turned that into a racial term.

The video feels deeply nostalgic. Were there real people or places that shaped it?

My life in Berlin shaped the setting and the casting — the people in it were people in my life. And my life in LA shaped the song. For the video, I wanted it to feel a bit like an Éric Rohmer film, perhaps with a bit of Run Lola Run.  Youthful, in a style of another time, not exactly the early 60s, not exactly the 80s, but a time when cafe culture was a valid form of nightlife. When people would stay up all night discussing literature, kissing, falling in and out of love —at least, that's how I imagine it —this culture has been blasted away by other cultures I'm not so fond of.

What do you hope this song says to listeners who don't feel seen in today's loud world?

People say you're weird. You're too quiet. You read too much. You dance oddly.  Well, don't care about what they say or how they look at you.  Don't even pretend to care, because deep down you already know you actually don't. 

You don't just have the right to live the way that turns you on. It's your f-ing moral duty to be who you are.