S-Curve Records
AJR is gearing up for the release of their new album, OK ORCHESTRA, which arrives on March 26.
The band, comprised of brothers Adam, Jack and Ryan Met, sat down with Billboard to tease their upcoming studio effort while celebrating the newfound success of their nearly year-old single “Bang!”
Jack said his family “had the 9 celebration” when “Bang!” reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest position it had achieved during its 27-week run. But the next chart. which updates on January 23, has the song at number eight, so another celebration is in order.
The band is currently putting the finishing touches on OK ORCHESTRA, the follow-up to 2019’s Neotheather.
With the cancellation of their Neotheater World Tour Part 2 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, AJR says they took advantage of their open schedule and “spent the entire year of 2020 writing our next album.”
“We’ve really thought about it as the third chapter in the trilogy that was The Click, Neotheater and now OK ORCHESTRA, which has been both artistically and musically three steps of growing up a little bit,” explains Ryan. “So this feels like kind of the final chapter of that little saga. But more specifically, musically, I think it’s the most extreme we’ve ever been.”
Ryan illustrated that description by telling Billboard, “We’re just working on a song right now that’s very like Americana, like Dave Alvin, Brandi Carlile, that kind of feel. We’re going extremely in that direction, and extremely in the hard hip hop direction, and extremely in the classical direction. It’s more extreme than any album we’ve ever made before, sonically.”
By Megan Duley
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