This single — from The Great Escape Artist, Jane's Addiction's first album in eight years, due September 27th — comes on like an art-metal freak show set on some distant planet. It opens with Perry Farrell sounding like Carl Sagan in an episode of Cosmos, musing ominously about the stars and some sort of big bang. The verses are built around droning funk, as the band backs Farrell's ponderings with a rubbery bass line and some clattering percussion. But then Farrell unleashes that familiar majestic bray of his, asks whether we wonder what the band looks like naked (uh, that horse has left the barn, dude) and announces, "God is a real man." Or is it "God isn't real, man?" Whatever: Giant guitar swarms from Dave Sitek and Dave Navarro soon blow away Farrell's philosophizing.

This review was updated to reflect the following: Dave Sitek is not a co-producer for The Great Escape Artist, but rather a member of the album's creative team. The album's producer is Rich Costey.

Listen to "Irresistable Force":

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“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"