Hear Mumford & Sons Show Off Electric Sound on ‘Believe’
Last week, Mumford & Sons announced they would take a foray into the world of synthesizers and electric guitars on their upcoming new album Wilder Mind. Today, the band unveiled the music video for first single “Believe,” the band’s maiden journey into their new plugged-in soundscape.
Perhaps inspired by the revved-up intensity of “Believe,” the music video provides the viewer a first-person seat behind the wheel of an automobile driving chaotically at night. As the song picks up speed, so does the ride, with the view outside the front windshield often kaleidoscopic and out of focus. The drive ends, cleverly, at the same bench overlooking a city skyline that features on the Wilder Mind cover.
Marcus Mumford shared the backstory behind the band’s newest single with Rolling Stone. “We were in Texas at a wedding all together. My best friend got married in Texas, and so the family at the ranch let us stay on in an outhouse for a week, and we did a lot of writing there,” Mumford said. “I had to leave early by a day. By the time we met up in London a couple of weeks later to demo the songs that we’d been writing, the boys brought ‘Believe’ to the table and I got it and just sang.”
Mumford admitted that, while he wrote much of the lyrics for the band’s prior albums Sigh No More and Babel, his bandmates took the “Believe” reins. “It was shortly after the time where I had done Basement Tapes, and really enjoyed singing and not playing. I was enjoying being a singer, and it happened with that song,” Mumford said. “And you know there was sketches of lyrics. We all collaborated on lyrics a lot more on this record than we did on records in the past, and so we sat down and did rough demos for a song and that one came up like that. And we actually used the guitar solos from the demos for that song.”
Wilder Mind is due out May 4th. The band will then embark on their Gentlemen of the Road Stopovers tour, which features a two-day mini-festivals at unique locations across the U.S., plus a headlining gig at this year’s Bonnaroo.