James Mercer (The Shins) and Brian Burton (a.k.a. Danger Mouse), collectively known as Broken Bells, will release their sophomore record, After the Disco, on February 4th via Columbia Records – but we’ve got the advance stream a week early to calm your impatient nerves. It’s streaming in full, right now, over at iTunes.
The follow-up to the duo’s 2010′s self-titled debut is a roughly outlined concept album. They aimed to capture “what people in the Fifties and Sixties thought now was gonna be like,” as Burton explained to Rolling Stone. “When you’re younger, you have ideas and visions of what you’re going to be like when you’re older and what love is going to be like and who you’re gonna be married to and all of these different things. Hearing some of the sounds from the synthesizers in the Eighties, and things like that, bring up certain kinds of emotional elements from when you were younger.”
Burton also spoke about the pair’s creative approach, saying, “It’s a pretty sad record. It’s pretty bleak in a way. We used the same couple of guitars, the same bass, the same drums, maybe two or three synthesizers at most for the whole album. I like the idea of two guys being able to make something that sounds really big. It’s not dance music by any means, but it’s fast enough to be danced to. When I think of Broken Bells, I don’t think of it as music you could dance to so it definitely wasn’t anything we shied away from, but it still had the sadness, it still had the kind of darker melancholy thing we like to do.”
However the approach, it’s sounding fantastic to us. Pre-order After The Disco at the band’s official site, and check back soon for our full review – in the meantime, enjoy some awesome new sounds from one of 2014’s most anticipated albums.
