Prepare yourself for the “most extreme” version of AJR.

That’s how band member Ryan Met described the brother trio’s upcoming new album, OK ORCHESTRA, in an interview with ABC Audio prior to the record’s announcement. He added that the effort would include the “saddest,” “angriest” and the “fastest, happiest, most chipper” songs AJR has ever written.

“I think we told our fan base, ‘This is our sound,’ and we have groundwork there,” Ryan explained. “Now I feel really comfortable…orbiting around our sound and being, like, ‘Ooh, maybe we can go this angry, maybe we can go this sad.’ So that’s been a fun feeling writing this album.”

OK ORCHESTRA will follow AJR’s 2019 release Neotheather, which spawned hit singles in “100 Bad Days” and “Dear Winter.” In a social media post earlier this year, the band shared that they didn’t want their next album to feel like a “cake recipe” that simply reused ingredients that made a past work successful.

With that in mind, Jack Met knew that the new album had to respect its audience and treat them like “they’re a lot smarter than you think they are” — “Which they are!” he exclaimed.

“If they listen to the album, and they know that we had commercial success with Neotheater, they’re gonna hear that, ‘OK, we replicated the ‘Dear Winter’ of the album,'” Jack said.

“Our fans are obviously, like I said, really smart,” he added. “So we wanted to bypass and work a little bit harder so they can actually hear something new without rooting their listening experience by saying, ‘Oh, they just gave us the exact same thing.'”

OK ORCHESTRA is due out March 26, 2021.

By Josh Johnson
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