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May 22, 2012 Yeasayer By John Everhart and Laura Studarus Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern

As revealed in Under the Radar‘s new cover story, Yeasayer will be releasing their new album, Fragrant World, on August 21 via Secretly Canadian. It’s the band’s third album, the followup to 2010’s Odd Blood. You can read all about the album via an in-depth 10-page cover story in Under the Radar‘s new June/July issue. It’s the Brooklyn-based band’s first interview about the album.

“We definitely try to capture the schizophrenia of what it’s like to be alive today,” Yeasayer’s co-frontman/multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder says in the article.

Fragrant World is inspired in part by such dystopian stories as Blade Runner, but it is also a dense, ambitious, thoroughly modern, and complicated pop record.

“I listened to a lot of R&B records while we were making this,” co-frontman/multi-instrumentalist Chris Keating explains in the article. “I wanted to make a record that was legitimately, to use a bad word, funky. Listening to Teddy Pendergrass and then Aaliyah records. Something that legitimately has a sway to it, tempos I call mid-tempo come-ons, BPM ranges that you’re seeing in more R&B kind of stuff and some really sub-y bass tones. But there’s nothing more broadly conceptual than that.

“I was saying that we’re making sci-fi Pam Grier music, or like Ridley Scott. Maybe Blade Runner across 110th Street,” he says, referencing Bobby Womack’s 1972 soul/blaxploitation hit “Across 110th Street.” “We’re using a lot of sci-fi music elements, and combining them with soul music is our overarching theme. I don’t know if that comes across, but I think it does.”

Fragrant World was recorded in their native Brooklyn. Thanks to a recommendation from Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin, they recorded at the Brooklyn studio of indie label Mexican Summer, renting the space for two months and venturing a few blocks away to Plantain Studios to work for a short stretch with Abe Seiferth, renowned for his collaborations with DFA artists. “We really were focused on being in New York for the record. We wanted to experience the fall into winter that happens in Brooklyn,” says Keating.

Things got interesting when the band traveled to London for some final mixing with Dan Carey (M.I.A., Hot Chip). “We were so crazy sick that we thought we were going to die,” recalls Keating. “The three of us were in the apartment we rented. Maybe it was the cathartic dispelling of the pent-up dark tension of this record.”

You can read much, much more about Yeasayer and Fragrant World in Under the Radar‘s cover story article, which is written by John Everhart. The article goes into further detail about the recording of the album, the themes behind the record and its specific songs (such as the political aspects of both “Reagan’s Skeleton” and album opener “Fingers Never Bleed”), as well as giving a window into the childhoods and personalities of the band’s three members (Keating, Wilder, and Ira Wolf Tuton). The article also features an exclusive photo shoot with the band in Brooklyn by Wendy Lynch Redfern, who also shot the multiple exposure cover seen above.

Fragrant World‘s full tracklist:

The digital/iPad version of the issue also features bonus interviews with: Brian Jonestown Massacre, Can, Hundreds, Light Asylum, Lotus Plaza, Mount Eerie, and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow on his DROKK project.

Subscribe to the print version here.

Subscribe to the digital version here.

The issue has already shipped out to subscribers and stores.

Yeasayer Tour Dates:

6/19: Richmond, VA @ National
6/20: Asheville, NC @ Orange Peel
6/21: Knoxville, TN @ Bijou Theater
6/22: Nashville, TN @ Cannery
6/23: Louisville, KY @ Headliners
6/24: Cincinnati, OH @ 20th Century Theater
7/02: Vienna, Austria @ Szene
7/04: Gdynia, Poland @ Heineken Open’er Festival
7/07: Bruges, Belgium @ Cactus Festival
7/08: Lieges, Belgium @ Les Ardentes
7/09: Utrecht, Holland @ Tivoli De Heling
7/13: Norfolk, England @ Latitude
7/15: Grafenhainichen, Germany @ Melt Festival