Mumford & Sons on new album: 'Like we're just getting started'

After a seven-year creative break, they now seem to be pounding out albums one after another. Just 11 months since their last album, Mumford & Sons are already bringing out another one - "Prizefighter", out on February 20.

"In a way it feels like we're just getting started," frontman Marcus Mumford told dpa.

He's visibly pleased with the new work "Prizefighter" — the title meaning professional boxer.

"I think it just feels like 'go time' to us. Honestly, it's like maybe we've got around the first lap and now we're finding a pace and it's time to dig in, and there's an energy and an enthusiasm towards what we're doing."

Keyboard player Ben Lovett agreed. "It feels like being a new band again. It's invigorating." Perhaps that is why the 14 new songs sound so personal, fresh and youthful.

Many of the tracks came together on the road, helped by ever-evolving technology, with the album recorded in just 10 studio days but written and prepared while travelling, partly on tour. "It's funny how much you can do on your phone these days, writing-wise. It's scary," Lovett said.

Voice memos were often the spark that lit a new song. "I was going through my voice memos yesterday after a long conversation with Aaron Dessner about making the record, and it's wild how much of it started as little pieces captured while flying around — just grabbing moments here and there," Mumford said.

The National's Aaron Dessner produced the new record. Guests on "Prizefighter" include Hozier on the first single "Rubber Band Man", Gracie Abrams on "Badlands" and Chris Stapleton on the album opener "Here".

In an era when most music fans use streaming services to pick individual songs rather than listen to a whole album from start to finish, this is a record that rewards both approaches. The new songs work excellently on shuffle, yet playing the album from start to finish is just as satisfying.

Do they have favourites? "There's definitely a league table. Right now my top three are 'Alley Cat', 'Here', 'Conversation With My Son (Gangsters and Angels)'," Lovett said. Mumford, by contrast, loves "The Banjo Song", the third single, a beautiful declaration of love in times of faltering. The song is already great fun live, he says.

The title track and second single "Prizefighter" were also crucial to how the album came together. "And I agree about 'Conversation With My Son (Gangsters and Angels)'. Even after playing it maybe fifty times, it still feels fresh, which is exciting," Mumford said.

That freshness also comes through in the listening experience, not only on the song that warms listeners like a musical embrace before it swells and, after more than three minutes, opens like a door to a ballroom.

Beautiful lyrics, always a Mumford & Sons strength, can also be found here. In "Shadow of a Man" Mumford twists like a snake through the undergrowth, stands empty-handed and longs to be calm at last, to find a reason to believe and to trust.

In "I'll Tell You Everything" he sings: "I was a bank robber, then I was Superman, for a time I was a ghost." And: "In the end I'll tell you everything, I am sorry if it keeps you awake. (…) Before I bend, before I break."

Some songs invite singalongs too, especially road-trip tracks such as "The Banjo Song", "Alleycat" and "Run Together". The instructions for use for these songs could read: turn it up, roll down the car windows, be happy.