Last summer, Andy Bell headed to Brooklyn to work on new music with Erasure bandmate, songwriter and keyboardist Vince Clarke. The band didn’t have a concrete intention for a follow-up to 2017’s World Be Gone— “[An album] is in the distance,” Bell said at the time — but a year later they’re teasing Neon, out August 21st via Mute.
The 10-track album was written and produced by Erasure and recorded in Atlanta earlier this year. “It was about refreshing my love — hopefully our love — of great pop,” Bell explained in a statement. “I want kids now to hear these songs! I wanted to recharge that feeling that pop can come from anyone.”
This will be the 18th full-length album from the duo, and the first song, “Hey Now (Think I Got a Feeling),” certainly harks back to the type of upbeat dance tracks that shot them to pop stardom in the Eighties. They were a shock to the establishment in many ways when their gay-love track “A Little Respect” — on Rolling Stone‘s list of 25 Essential LGBTQ Pride Songs — became a Top 20 hit in the U.S. in 1988.
“If you’re doing music, you should use it for something and have substance,” Bell once told Seventeen. “Being gay and open about it is my substance.”
