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Ahead of their much discussed headline performance at Reading and Leeds Festival, Mumford & Sons will release their third studio album Wilder Mind in May. See the tracklisting below.
The band announced the third LP and follow-up to the colossal-seller Babel will arrive on shelves on 5 May through Gentle Of The Road/Island Records. The band are already booked in at a number of some of the biggest festivals on the planet so far including Bonaroo, Open'Er, Rock Werchter and Reading and Leeds: so the anthems are expected to come thick and fast.
The album was recorded at Air Studios in London and produced by James Ford (the man behind Arctic Monkeys, Haim and Florence). Written in sessions in London, Brooklyn, and Texas, a number of songs were demo'd at The National's Aaron Dessner garage studio.
The band have also promised a signifcant departure in the band's material, whose sound Marcus Mumford describes as “a development, not a departure.” It would appear they may have actually gone electric. Possibly. “Towards the end of the Babel tour, we’d always play new songs during soundchecks, and none of them featured the banjo, or a kick-drum" said Marcus. "And demoing with Aaron meant that, when we took a break, we knew it wasn’t going to involve acoustic instruments. We didn’t say: ‘No acoustic instruments.’ But I think all of us had this desire to shake it up. The songwriting hasn’t changed drastically; it was led more by a desire to not do the same thing again. Plus, we fell back in love with drums! It’s as simple as that.”
“It felt completely natural, though,” adds Ben Lovett, “like it did when we started out. It was very much a case of, if someone was playing an electric guitar, drums were going to complement that best; and, sonically, it then made sense to add a synth or an organ. We chose instruments that played well off each other, rather than consciously trying to overhaul it.”
The album will be available in a range of formats, starting at a digital download and ending up as a limied edition 7" collectors box containing vinyl singles, photo cards and a hardcover book housed in a metal tin.
The tracklisting is the following (those with a * mark a track exclusive to a deluxe edition):
01. Tompkins Square Park
02. Believe
03. The Wolf
04. Wilder Mind
05. Just Smoke
06. Monster
07. Snake Eyes
08. Broad-Shouldered Beasts
09. Cold Arms
10. Ditmas
11. Only Love
12. Hot Gates
13. Tompkins Square Park (Live) *
14. Believe (Live) *
15. The Wolf (Live) *
16. Snake Eyes (Live) *
Mumford & Sons are set to play:
11-14 June Bonnaroo Festival, Manchester Tennessee, USA
3 July Open'Er Festival Gydnia, Poland
9-11 July Bilbao BBK Live, Spain
10 July NOS Alive Festival Lisbon, Portugal
7-9 August Squamish Squamish Valley, BC Canada
28-30 August Reading Festival
28-30 Leeds Festival
Reading and Leeds Festival tickets are on sale now.
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