The New Pornographers have announced a sort-of (but not really) concept album about cars

The New Pornographers have announced a new album, and dropped teaser-track ‘Falling Down The Stairs Of Your Smile’.

‘In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights’ is due 27th September via the band’s own Collected Work Records imprint in partnership with Concord Records.

Frontman A.C. Newman says of the single: “There are so many songs like ‘the something of love’ — you know, there’s ‘The Book of Love,’ ‘The Freeway of Love’… Then I thought of ‘falling down the stairs of your love,’ and I thought, that kind of works.

“I think it has that element of how do you deal with the ideas of love and happiness in this world right now? When current events are stressful, that makes a stress on people’s relationships, and you’re trying to figure out how to be happy in this loving relationship in this world that seems ugly at every turn, which is not as easy as it seems. So I like the metaphor of love as something that you fall down.”

“I was about two-thirds of the way through the record when I began to notice that lyrically so much of it was pointing toward car songs,” he adds. “The opening track is ‘You’ll Need a Backseat Driver,’ and that was a metaphor that seemed to be running through other songs, too.

"Next to the love song, I feel like the car song is one of the most iconic kinds of songs in pop music, from Chuck Berry to the present. There was so much of that throughout it that I started thinking: ‘Oh, no, there’s too many references to cars on this record!’ And then I thought, ‘No, that's good—people might think it’s a concept album.’”

The track listing reads:

1. You’ll Need A Backseat Driver
2. The Surprise Knock
3. Falling Down The Stairs Of Your Smile
4. Colossus Of Rhodes
5. Higher Beams
6. Dreamlike And On The Rush
7. You Won’t Need Those Where You’re Going
8. Need Some Giants
9. Opening Ceremony
10. One Kind Of Solomon
11. Leather On The Seat