As previously reported, Mumford & Sons are going a different direction on their third album, Wilder Mind. They are trading in their banjo-driven acoustic sound for something more electric. The new 12-track album was recorded at Air Studios, London and produced by James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, HAIM, Florence + The Machine) with a number of the songs written in Aaron Dessner's (The National) garage studios in Brooklyn.
In a new interview with NME, Ben Lovett said working with Dessner helped give the band an "identity" on their new album.
"We met Aaron touring around, just on the circuit," Lovett explained. "We've been huge fans of The National for ages. All of us, individually have got a very personal attachment to their music. We ended up being complete super fans. After meeting Aaron, [he] said: 'Come to my garage in Brooklyn and we'll make some music'. It was quite innocent really."
Lovett said they took the songs from these writing sessions back to London to record.
"We didn't lock ourselves away. We'd find ourselves doing a week here, a week there. If I added it up it'd be five weeks, but it was really scattered... We got to a point where we had an idea of what the record was going to be. We had an identity. Some of the songs suddenly felt like they had to be on the record, instead of just being songs that we liked. It's quite a spectrum of different sounds and songwriting styles."
Although this departure of sound and style might be a surprise for some fans, frontman Marcus Mumford recently told Rolling Stone that they had planned the change all along after being exhausted mentally and musically from their nonstop touring.
"We felt that doing the same thing, or the same instrumentation again, just wasn't for us," Mumford told them. "We've got a broader taste in music than just that."
Bassist Ted Dwane added, "None of us had really any interest in doing a sort of Babel 2. It was always going to be different."
It's probably a welcome change for those tired of the folk-revival sound that inundated the industry after Mumford & Son's initial success. The band also shared writing duties this time around, which will be a change from the previous albums that Mumford helmed lyrically.
Wilder Mind is due out May 4 and is the follow-up to their enormously successful debut and sophomore efforts, 2009's Sigh No More and 2012's Babel. The lead single "Believe" is due out March 9.
