Midnight of the Century is the debut album by Brooklyn band Blacklist.

The song "Shock in the Hotel Falcon" was inspired by George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

"Language of the Living Dead" references the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

The album's liner notes open with the phrase "Fiat justitia ruat caelum" and contain quotes from Jacques Lacan, Don DeLillo, Rumi and Salman Rushdie.

In terms of how this functions with the music, Blacklist's singer/lyricist Joshua Strawn said: ...if you want to read my lyrics for the subtexts and hear us as a political band, you can certainly do that and you can practically get a reading list from our songs (Ibn Rushd, Omar Khayyam, George Orwell, Victor Serge, Arjun Appadurai, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Salman Rushdie, Slavoj Žižek, just to give you the short list).