We Are Scientists’ eighth studio album and follow-up to ‘Huffy’ album, ‘Lobes’ will be released January 20th, 2023 via Masterswan Recordings.

‘Lobes’ is expected to see the lovable and dynamic duo (vocalist/guitarist Keith Murray and bassist Chris Cain) at their most playful and creatively free, continuing to expand upon the band’s feel-good indie rock sound by exploring more of their own input on production.

Murray says the album’s lead single ‘Operator Error’ is the song that bridges ‘Lobes’ with their previous album 2021’s ‘Huffy’. “We consider ‘Huffy’ our daytime record – it’s an upbeat rock album designed to soundtrack jet ski rides to the Bahamas and piña colada in aquamarine-tiled jacuzzis. Our new album, ‘Lobes’, however, is our nighttime album. As the first song on the record, ‘Operator Error’ soundtracks that moment when you realize that all of those tiki cocktails you started drinking at 11:00am are going to give you a wicked hangover by sunset, and so your best bet is to just keep the party going, consequences be damned!” He adds, “’Lobes’ is, overall, more electronic, dancier, more ominous, and way sexier than Huffy; ‘Operator Error’ kicks the door open into that seamy underworld.”

The lyrics for ‘Lobes’ were written over a stretch of two to three years as the songs themselves came to fruition. Though the origins of the first songs begin around the same time as Huffy, they exist in entirely different musical universes. “The earliest songs like ‘Operator Error’ and ‘Dispense With Sentiment’ reflect my standard level of overthinking everything and bungling romantic interactions, anxiety, and low-level disfunction,” Murray says. Following those two previous songs, ‘Human Resources’ came very early on in the writing process, and it became their compass for the rest of the album.

“We consider ‘Huffy’ our daytime record while ‘Lobes’, however, is our nighttime album”

‘Operator Error’ was just released, can you share some words about this new song?

Keith Murray: It’s your classic pop banger – big old vocal hooks, squelching synthesizers, danceable as all get out. Except, you know, better than everyone else is doing that kind of thing.

I hear that ‘Operator Error’ is the first single off your upcoming album, why did you want to kick off with this single? What can listeners expect with the rest of ‘Lobes’?

We thought that ‘Operator Error’ would be a good transitional song between ‘Lobes’ and our previous album, ‘Huffy’. We consider the two to be sort of sister albums, with ‘Huffy’ as kind of a daytime, speedboat-racing rock album, and ‘Lobes’ being the night time, Miami club, dance-bangers album. It’s a little moodier, but also more sonically interesting and gets the heart pounding a little more. ‘Operator Error’ sits at the perfect midpoint between the two — it’s kind of like the ape who’s just getting up on two feet, in that graphic depiction of the Evolution of Man.

Last year you released ‘Huffy,’ would you like to share some words about the recording and producing process?

We recorded ‘Huffy’ and a bit of ‘Lobes’ during the lockdown, at the very beginning of the pandemic. We had just started recording ‘Huffy’ when everything shut down, and the owner of the studio found himself trapped in Europe for the entirety of quarantine, and we ended up having access to the recording space for longer than we had anticipated. It gave us the opportunity to really dig down and get exploratory with our production techniques.

A lot of our favorite productions ended up being the songs that we ultimately earmarked for ‘Lobes,’ and when we started writing the rest of the record we definitely wrote with an eye toward creating songs that were complementary to that sound – more electronic, dancier, ambitious in their production and arrangements, but still easy as hell to down like a spectacular, fruity cocktail on a light-up dance floor.

“We tend to each write on our own at home”

How do you usually approach songwriting as a band?

We tend to each write on our own at home and then share the songs with one another one when we think we’ve come up with something that could be expanded into a We Are Scientists song. Both of us have gotten pretty good at making demos that sound a lot like finished songs, which is what gave us the idea to produce ‘Huffy’ and ‘Lobes’ on our own. These days, a big part of our job as band members is to act as editors on one another’s songs, to identify what’s good about them and then totally deconstruct and rebuild them from the ground up, so that they end up sounding like We Are Scientists, a product of both of our minds.

How would you describe your sound?

I would describe it as the most addictive, intelligent pop imaginable. That’s how I describe it to anyone who will listen: any journalists, friends, strangers on the street or garbage men, really. Anyone.

You released a ton of albums and I would like to take this opportunity to ask if you can comment on each of the albums with a sentence or two; what are some thoughts that run through your mind when hearing it again?

‘With Love and Squalor’: Rudimentary but spunky and delightful.

‘Brain Thrust Mastery’: An ambitious and elegant album, and a real moment of growth.

‘Barbara’: Sassy and wild and full of fun hooks.

‘TV En Français’: Probably the most confident we’ve ever been, making a record. Definitely the best songwriting we’d ever produced, at that point. It was a step up for us, and it changed the way we thought about writing music — it was less about writing for the live show and more about making a cohesive album.

‘Helter Seltzer’: Good vibes and breezy tunes. This one was a real pleasure to make. We recorded it in New York City with friends, and you can really hear that in the production, I think.

‘Megaplex’: Very cool, and an attempt to push ourselves out of our comfort zone, a bit. There’s an edge to this record that I love because it’s not an aggressive edge; it sounds like a bunch of happy guys who are also, yeah, getting a little edgy.

‘Huffy’: Part one of the best writing streak we’ve ever had, as a band. So many bangers on this one, and it’s got fun, live rock energy to it, which is something that we often try to nail as a band, but rarely manage to actually capture on tape. I think producing it ourselves gave it a little bit of that wildness and personality that can sometimes be diminished, when your ideas are being filtered through a third party.

‘Lobes’: A clutch of our very best songs, produced so that they represent precisely what was in our heads, at the time. ‘Huffy’ and ‘Lobes’ represent, I think, the first time I’ve really truly been satisfied that what we were hearing in our minds made its way onto the record. ‘Lobes’ edges ‘Huffy’ out because it’s got a clutch of my very favorite WAS songs and the production is just that much more gratifying and ambitious.

What are some future plans?

Hopefully we’re going to tour our butts off, around this album. Just tour and tour and tour and tour. And then also tour.

Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?

Neither of us is involved in any other bands. Neither of us has really been in another real bad at all, actually. I dabbled in some bands in college, but nothing that really mattered in any true sense until we formed We Are Scientists in Berkeley, California in 2000. So yeah this is our one and only band.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

It’s not really new anymore, but that last Charli XCX record is a real banger. Magdalena Bay has been a favorite of mine for the past year and a half or so. And Coach Party is a fantastic band, consistently putting out EPs that are fun as hell. All are worth checking out.

Klemen Breznikar

Headline photo: Dan Monick

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