Pop-rockers Neon Trees are back with Sink Your Teeth, their first studio album in four years. It’s a time of major renewal for them. When frontman Tyler Glenn recently spoke to American Songwriter, he was amped to get the new album out and happy the band spent the whole summer touring, including a triple bill with 311 and AWOLNATION. He says things have been bouncing back for the band, whom he felt were still recovering from the pandemic and getting to tour steadily once more. Plus they are finally releasing this new collection of 12 songs that are sure to please many longtime fans.
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Finding Its Footing
Glenn acknowledges the group is finding its footing again and starting a new chapter with Sink Your Teeth. “I want to continue to put music out,” he stresses. “I don’t want to wait another four years. I have this urge to progress and push ourselves more. I think we’re in a really happy place as the band. We really love each other again. We have a great manager that’s just supportive and has a plan, and it feels like we’ve got that support again. It’s nice to have that almost 15 years into our recording career. It’s crazy.”
After breaking through to the masses with their mainstream Mercury Records debut Habits in 2010, the foursome released two more albums, Picture Show (2012), and Top-10 hit Pop Psychology (2014). They scored three very popular singles: the Double Platinum “Animal,” the Septuple Platinum, Top-10 smash “Everybody Talks,” and the Gold-certified “Sleeping with a Friend.” Interestingly, none of the band’s albums went Gold. Neon Trees are solidly a singles band, and it works for them.
A Change in Direction
Things started to shift when Glenn, the leader of an all-Mormon band, came out in 2014, and in late 2015 left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) because of their constrictive stance on LGBTQ rights. His 2016 solo album Excommunication produced a controversial video for the song “Trash” that reportedly offended some Mormons, but not his bandmates. (Drummer Elaine Bradley has said in the past that not all of them are practicing Mormons.) It may have even encouraged some in the church to soften their stance on its LGBTQ members.
While Neon Trees released three more singles, they would not put out another studio album until I Can Feel You Forgetting Me in 2020 on the indie label Thrill Forever. The timing was unfortunate as the pandemic just started and musicians and bands did not tour for a year. Momentum was lost.
On the outside, it felt like a period of hiatus, but there were other factors at play. Glenn’s bandmates were all raising families. And there was the shift away from Mercury.
“It never felt to us like there was a pause,” Glenn explains. “I think publicly it looked like there was. I did my solo record, and then we did [the single] ‘Feel Good’ [in 2017]. Then I asked to get dropped from Island [the home of Mercury]. I wasn’t happy there. It was sort of a mutual agreement, but I felt like the label that we got signed to changed. I think plenty of artists will tell you that these days. You live a cycle with a group of people that are working your records, and all of a sudden the whole infrastructure is taken from under you. I just didn’t find identity in the major system anymore, and I think we felt lost with where we wanted to go. We did an EP that was a complete about-face that we never released, that was a little more disco. We just listened to it together, and it was really cool. It would be cool to see the light of day at some point.”
The untitled EP included early and different arrangements of songs like “Used to Like About You” and “Nights.” “A few of those songs eventually turned into I Can Feel You Forgetting Me,” Glenn explains.
Recapturing the Excitement
In addressing the long gap between albums, Glenn says: “I think it’s also just happenstance, like circumstantial stuff that happened to us, whether it was managers [or] finding our footing. Obviously, the pandemic halted a bunch of progress for us. I feel like I’ve stayed prolific and have folders upon folders of songs. A lot of the time, we needed support and didn’t have it. We feel like a cat somehow, like we’re on our seventh life, but the fact that people still even care really gets me going. If I just had an outlet to write music, and if no one listened to it, I would still probably do it. It helps me and heals me, and it makes me feel like I have purpose.”
The ride keeps going. Neon Trees play NBC’s Today program tomorrow morning (September 19), and will host a private listening party in New York City in the evening. Getting that mainstream television validation makes the release of Sink Your Teeth feel special for the band and “makes it feel like we’re not just adding another song to Spotify,” Glenn says.
“How do we get it to feel special, even just to us, let alone the fans?,” he adds. “For us, that rush was going to a store and seeing the CD end cap and touching something physical. That’s how we grew up. How do you make it feel at least a little elevated? I’m happy that we’re doing these coastal release parties and a little TV. It makes it feel a little more real and tangible.”
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