New York, NY (Top40 Charts) LANY return today with 'good guys' and its accompanying video, the first single to be released from the trio's forthcoming third album Mama's Boy - due out on Polydor Records/Universal
Music later this year - and their first new music since 2018's Malibu Nights.
"As soon as you say 'I love spending time with you' to someone, they figure something out and they're not interested anymore," says frontman Paul Klein of the song's meaning. "It's like a challenge. You accomplish the task of getting someone to like you and they move on."
Mama's Boy is an intentional return to the band's roots. After finishing the last leg of their world tour behind Malibu Nights, Paul - who was born and raised in Oklahoma before moving with the band to L.A. - decamped to a studio in the country outside Nashville. He lived and recorded there for two weeks, joined by bandmates Jake Goss and Les Priest as well as a host of gifted songwriting collaborators including Dan Smyers of Dan + Shay; Shane McAnally, best known for his Grammy-winning contributions to Kacey Musgraves' Golden Hour; and songwriting power couple
Sasha Sloan and King Henry. Others, including
Adele cowriter Dan Wilson, also contributed to the album when the sessions returned to L.A, where Mama's Boy was completed.
Over those two weeks in Nashville Paul began to put into words and music the cognitive dissonance between the L.A. persona he'd adopted over the band's rise and his Great Plains heritage. "Someone asked me where I was from and somewhere, out of my spirit, I just said 'Man, I'm from Oklahoma!' It was a weird sense of pride, to be from the middle of nowhere," he says of the realization that he needed to look to the country's heartland for this album's inspiration. Thematically Mama's Boy is a sweeping tribute to home, heritage and Americana filled with songs that highlight what's "symbolic of being an American kid" today.
LANY's breakthrough came with their 2017 self-titled debut, amassing an international fanbase and selling out multiple nights at arenas across the world. Their 2018 follow-up Malibu Nights sealed the deal. Its heartbreak anthems cracked the Billboard Album Chart and connected in a huge way across the globe. The statistics speak for themselves: LANY have a social media following of 5.8 million people, have sold over 415,000 tickets worldwide and played sold-out shows from London's Brixton Academy to L.A.'s Greek Theatre, with arena shows in major cities planned for this album. Their songs have been streamed over 3 billion times and they've had over 400 million video views to date.
But all of this is just the beginning. "There was only one person in the world I cared about hearing Malibu Nights," says Paul. "Now, there's not one person in the world I don't want to hear Mama's Boy."
