Broken Bells Keep Grooving ‘After the Disco’

Broken Bells have offered up a funky new cut, “After the Disco,” from their upcoming album of same name. “After the Disco” keeps up the space-disco vibes of the previously released track “Holding On for Life,” with Shins frontman James Mercer crooning about the apocalypse and his uncertainty about growing older (“I see the ashes on the ground/ Another world is burning down”) over Danger Mouse’s shimmering, starry-eyed production.

“You can dance to it, but it still has the sadness, the darker melancholy thing we like to do,” Danger Mouse (real name: Brian Burton) told Rolling Stone recently of the song. The track sprung from a random melody that Mercer played on guitar while waiting for a car to the airport, and ended up capturing the anxieties that helped shape Burton’s sparse production on the album.

Find Out Why Broken Bells’ ‘After the Disco’ is One Reason to Get Excited for 2014

“He can be pretty dark in his musings about life, being single, all that stuff,” Mercer said of his Broken Bells cohort. “Whereas I’ve left a lot of that behind. I’m kind of an old, married guy.”

“After the Disco” also follows up the band’s pair of short films, “Angel and the Fool” and “Holding On for Life,” which tell the story of a human and a spacewoman falling in love. Both were also compressed into one shorter clip to accompany “Holding On for Life.”

Following the release of After the Disco on February 4th, Broken Bells will hit the road for a short, 10-date North American trek starting February 28th at First Avenue in Minneapolis.