Cage the Elephant Reveal Title of Third Studio Album

Kentucky rock act Cage the Elephant will title their next album ‘Melophobia,’ named after the fear of music.  A snippet of the first single, ‘Come a Little Closer,’ can be heard on their YouTube channel. The full version will premiere Aug. 8 and be for sale digitally Aug. 13. 

Frontman Matt Shultz told Consequence of Sound, “The whole process [of making the album] was riddled with adversity and growing pains. I don’t want to make it seem like it wasn’t rewarding, ’cause there were moments of peace and beautiful grace. But there was no part of the process that was easy. I’ve always read of musicians that couldn’t stand their own music or the sound of their own voice. Now I understand that.”

Recording again with Jay Joyce, who produced 2011’s ‘Thank You, Happy Birthday,’ and their 2008 self-titled debut, Shultz says they aimed to make the music that was “super thoughtful but blend that with the playfulness.”

He added, “We wanted to see how we can take those odd spectrums and marry them cohesively. It kinda became a game of how you make it work -- the goal being to move in any direction so we could keep that in the future. People always talked about Bob Dylan finding holes in music and I wanted to do that, to find the holes in the music and fill it with stuff we weren’t hearing.”

Looking to keep things fresh, the band chose influences from David Bowie to Velvet Underground to EDM. Lyrically, Schultz said he began by writing “super inner reflective songs” but ended up writing about other people’s experiences, getting them to open up to him.

“I asked myself how honest could I be, and to say something poetic without it being poetic. I was talking with my friend, (Morning Teleportation frontman) Tiger Merritt, and he just said, ‘Write lyrics like the way you talk.’ And that was a big moment for me. Because people everyday say stuff that’s poetic. So, I’d invite people over, sit down in front of my typewriter and say, ‘Just talk about your day.' Things got really deep really fast. When I was interviewing people, and they really let me in, I found this kind of paradox. It was weird, ’cause there’s kind of two worlds struggling: the absolute truth and this other thing, where people are creating characters.”

Cage the Elephant's 'Melophobia' is expected this fall via RCA Records.