With millions of records sold, Young the Giant wanted to write its sixth album in the same fashion as its first: as a band together in a room.
"With that, there's a lot of energy in the room," guitarist Eric Cannata tells Q104.3 New York's Out of the Box. "And we're really looking for any idea, just any spark ... that just perks up our ears. Then, from there, we just start bouncing off each other. It's like a lot of kinetic energy together in the room, like kids in a sandbox almost."
To capture the spirit of the old days, much of the record was composed in relative isolation, with the five band members setting up at a house in the desert. Lead singer Sameer Gadhia says they wanted to shake up the writing process by leaving the comforts and responsibilities of home behind them for a short while.
"We were in Joshua tree in Idyllwild and just really, like, [needed to] live together, eat together, breathe this record," he says. "It's kind of taken us all the way back to the beginning in some way."
The resulting album, Victory Garden, the band's sixth studio LP is due out May 1. Pre-order or pre-save the album here.
The band announced the record with the lead single, "Different Kind of Love," which Sameer says is not quite a love song in the typical sense.
"A different kind of love being this very radical empathy, which I think in our time is its own form of resistance," Sameer explained. "We don't really write too many love songs. So this is one of those rare ones, but I think there's this concept of romantic philosophy, where love is easy and there's love at first sight. I think this song is about the harder type of love that you live through, that works through compromise, empathy and understanding."
Watch the full interview via the player above!
Check out the official music video for "Different Kind of Love" below!