The return of DATAROCK is finally upon us: the Norwegian act have announced their long-awaited third album Face the Brutality with a few teases. “Ruffle Shuffle” is a memorable return for the synth act – hooky, stylishly constructed and impeccably produced.

Face the Brutality will be released March 9, 2018 on YAP Records.

DATAROCK’s infectious brand of indie-dance has seen considerable international attention, including placements with Apple and Google – take one listen to the opening bassline of “Fa Fa Fa” and you’ll instantly recognize it.

Face the Brutality will be the band’s first LP since 2009 and first output since their musical (featuring 87 live musicians, as you do), The Musical, in 2015. Years in the making, Face the Brutality is an album for the bored and bitter survivors of 2017, an upbeat escape with substance.

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Confusion lies right at the heart of Bergen, Norway’s beloved DATAROCK. Just ask founder Fredrik Saroea to summarize the band’s history and it’ll make your head spin. On their 2009 album Red, for instance, they listed almost fifty members, and their musical, released, with unusual transparency, under the name The Musical in 2015, featured 87 guests. With so many members coming and going, Saroea jokes that the main member of the band has always been the red tracksuit, worn by musicians during DATAROCK’s live performances, for which they’ve become famous. Adding to the confusion, however, even that has now been replaced by a black one.

DATAROCK’s latest album is called Face the Brutality — try not to read anything too deep into that. “We heard a radio show in Canada with that name back in 2004,” Saroea confides, “and thought it sounded hilariously pretentious. Coming from a city of black metal, and with a background in punk and thrash metal, we found the title so utterly wrong for DATAROCK that we’ve always wanted to use it for an album.”

Bewildering as this all may seem, it does nothing to undermine the sincerity of what DATAROCK do. This, perhaps, is hard to credit, given the band’s history of red tracksuits and occasionally playful lyricism. There are, too, what one can only describe as Easter Eggs scattered throughout the album: see if you can find the homage to The Faces, or to cult 1985 film The Goonies. But while these may appear light-hearted, they’re also indicative of the genuine artistry central to DATAROCK’s playful aesthetic, one that’s drawn upon Talking Heads and Happy Mondays, The Fall and The Stone Roses, Television and Laurie Anderson, and even Kyle Dixon’s and Michael Stein’s Stranger Things score. As Saroea so eloquently puts it, “Referencing isn’t just something I do for fun, but out of respect for the proud tradition of quality music, a tradition one ought to know pretty well if one aspires to be part of it. As a friend of mine said when we were kids, ‘You know, music isn’t a private, personal matter – it’s a relation-driven individual mastering of tradition and technique.’”

Face the Brutality is full of tradition and technique: the woozy pop of “Ruffle Shuffle”, the laid-back groove of “Sense of Reason,” the wired funk of “Everything”, even going back to Plato and the Greek myth of Icarus on “Feathers and Wax”, proving that Saroea took his education seriously.

Subversive and mischievous, disarmingly modest, effortlessly entertaining, and as daft as they are heartfelt, DATAROCK have been sorely missing from our lives these unsettling recent years. Their ambitions remain humble – “We hope the next album will reach out and put a smile on our fellow bitter and bored friends around the world” – but Face the Brutality might even entertain a handful or two others.

Face the Brutality Tracklist:

BMX

Ruffle Shuffle

Sense of Reason

Laugh in the Face of Darkness

Everything

Feathers and Wax

Beautiful Monster

Invitation to Love

Outta Here

Darkness at the Edge of the Pit