MADDER! / EP 10 INCHES

Description

After conquering the world with their 28th studio album, MAD!, the ever-creative Ron and Russell Mael are releasing the first EP of their illustrious career. “Not wanting the madness to end, and buoyed by the phenomenal reaction to MAD!, we rushed – but intensely – into the studio to record a first for Sparks: an EP,” the band explains. MADDER!, a four-song companion piece to the album, is for everyone who isn’t MAD! enough already. We hope these new songs will take you to an even MADDER! place. The first single from the MADDER! EP, released on September 2nd, will be ‘Porcupine’, a song about a man’s fascination with a woman who has, shall we say, a prickly personality, all set to a verse with a very infectious organ riff that gives way to heavy guitars in the choruses. “She’s a porcupine,” Russell sings—a metaphor or something more unsettling? The other tracks on the EP are ‘Fantasize’, ‘Mess Up’, and ‘They’, and the new material is in the pioneering spirit of MAD!, which has been met with rave reviews, including five-star ratings from Record Collector (“…further proof of genius”) and the Daily Telegraph (“The gold standard of left-field pop”). Sparks’ recent European tour, featuring the usual eclectic selection from the Mael brothers' oeuvre against a stunning production, was also an unreserved success, with Louder Than War describing the show as “a hundred minutes of energetic and thrilling pop songs spanning half a century” and Classic Rock Magazine writing “Wit, pathos, and brutality… an immensely exciting injection of joy and power."