English Electric, the forthcoming album from the British synthpop group, should hit all the buttons of the act's 1980s hits like If You Leave and Enola Gay - but in new ways.
That's music to the ears of bassist/vocalist Andy McCluskey, who reformed the group's core lineup with keyboardist Paul Humphries, drummer Malcolm Holmes and multi-instrumentalist Martin Cooper in 2007.
"It's bloody hard to make new music 35 years after you've started," McCluskey says. "We're fortunate that we have a recognizable style. We have a sound palette that is our own. We would be foolish to abandon that. But how do you actually do that without sounding like a pastiche of yourselves? Trying to sound like OMD but also be contemporary and aware of modern sounds and production techniques is the balancing act."
English Electric comes out April 9.
On Tuesday, the band premiered a video for Metroland, the album's first single, on the Rolling Stone website. It's a gorgeously animated clip made in 1940s fashion, of a passenger train ride through farmland, white-picket-fence suburbia and urban landscapes.
OMD also has set several U.S. tour dates, starting with a string of shows in the Pacific Northwest, culminating in two weekends of Coachella next month. The group will return in the summer for a half-dozen major-market dates in the U.S.
"We're going to start in Vancouver and work our way down to Southern California, warming ourselves up," McCluskey says. "We already had a British and European tour booked, so we then come back to the Midwest and the East Coast in July."
