Mumford & Sons Talk Going Electric on New Album ‘Wilder Mind’
When Mumford & Sons‘ bassist Ted Dwane showed up at his London studio early last year to begin work on the group’s third album, he was confronted with a surprise: a room full of synthesizers. “It was bizarre,” he says. “I didn’t expect we were going to do the same thing again – but this was crazy!”
On their new album, Wilder Mind (out May 4th), Mumford & Sons have mostly removed their signature elements – banjo, acoustic strumming, stomping kick drum – and replaced them with U2-sized guitars, synths, spacey mellotrons and even some drum machines. “We felt that doing the same thing, or the same instrumentation again, just wasn’t for us,” says frontman Marcus Mumford. “We’ve got a broader taste in music than just that.” Adds Dwane, “None of us had really any interest in doing a sort of Babel 2. It was always going to be different.”
Near the end of the tour supporting their last album, Babel, the band was worn out both musically and mentally; they’d been touring more or less nonstop since 2009’s Sigh No More and were looking for new sounds. At sound checks, Winston Marshall traded his banjo for electric guitar and Mumford started playing more drums as the band jammed on heavy instrumentals and even some Radiohead tunes.
In September 2013, Mumford & Sons began what they thought would be a lengthy break, but found themselves back at work only three months later. After a couple of days in London at Dwane’s studio, the band headed to Brooklyn to write and demo tracks at the garage studio owned by the National’s Aaron Dessner. Mumford and Marshall were living in New York throughout the process (Mumford’s wife, actress Carey Mulligan, is returning to Broadway in the award-winning Skylight production this month).
“None of us had any interest in doing Babel 2. It was always going to be different.”
It was in New York where they wrote “Ditmas,” a catchy power-chord thrasher about a fractured relationship that set the tone for the album (Dessner’s studio is located in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park neighborhood). “To people that have heard it, it sounds like a jolt,” says Mumford. “But for us, it was just where we were headed.” The city is a recurring theme on the album (see also “Tompkins Square Park,” a vaguely Strokes-y breakup song).