New York's The Drums return with new album
New York-based pop revivalists have reconvened as a duo, and they're all the better for it
The winter mercury may be dropping, but pop fans will be basking in a summer glow next week when The Drums return with their shimmering surf tunes.
With songs that evoke balmy days spent by the sea, the Floridians were regarded as the new Beach Boys when they first hit the scene five years ago. Since then they've had some tough times, including the sudden departure of one of the band's founding members, but they've come through without losing the sense of sunny playfulness that first won fans over.
"We just really let ourselves have fun making music, for the first time in a long time," guitarist and percussionist Jacob Graham says of a do-or-die break last year when he and lead singer Jonny Pierce locked themselves away in a country cabin to decide whether or not to keep The Drums together.
"I think it was an important exercise for us. A couple songs from that cabin will never see the light of day, they were just too crazy. But the whole experience certainly put us in the right frame of mind to make Encyclopedia."
Encyclopedia is the band's third album and their first as a two-piece following the shock decision by original drummer Connor Hanwick to leave the band in 2011. The departure of a key component of the band's indie-surf sound brought gloom into the sunny world of The Drums and almost split the band.
But the time spent deciding on their future in the upstate New York cabin not only convinced Graham and Pierce that The Drums were a venture worth keeping alive, it was also fruitful, providing the inspiration for the lion's share of the songs on Encyclopedia.