The follow-up to their 2019's album False Alarm, was written and produced by the band both during and coming out of lockdown, with additional production from Jacknife Lee (Bloc Party, The Killers, Taylor Swift) and Dan Grech Marguerat (Halsey, Lana Del Rey, George Ezra), it will be out on September 2 via Lower Third/[PIAS]. Pre-order your copy here.
Keep On Smiling as a title implies a couple different things: for one, it’s a steadfast image of positivity and optimism, a plea to keep spirits bright in the face of anguish. But it also suggests that that anguish is nearly impossible to avoid, that the heaviness of our current reality is too hard to ignore, and to keep on smiling is an ironic way of acknowledging everyone’s pessimism.
The dichotomy of this idea — optimism versus pessimism, acknowledging change versus ignoring it — is at the core of Keep On Smiling. And in true Two Door Cinema Club fashion, the band has channeled these ideas through a bright, neon-colored glow, full of glitzy synths, classic melodies, and some nods to their raucous and bustling debut, Tourist History.
The band have also shared the album’s lead single, “Wonderful Life,” which represents the LP’s contrasting ideas perfectly. Though bassist Kevin Baird and guitarist Sam Halliday claim that a bulk of Keep On Smiling was crafted pre-pandemic in the months following False Alarm, “Wonderful Life” was one of the more recent tracks they worked on, and serves well as the album’s thesis and entry point. “It feels perfect, it sounds like us, it is us,” Baird says of the song. “We’re starting to get into the summer, it’s a ‘here we go’ kind of thing.”
Check out the album's tracklist and listen to "Wonderful Life", below.
Keep On Smiling Tracklisting:
01. Messenger AD (intro)
02. Blue Light
03. Everybody's Cool
04. Lucky
05. Little Piggy
06. Millionaire
07. High
08. Wonderful Life
09. Feeling Strange
10. Won't Do Nothing
11. Messenger HD
12. Disappearer
