Aaron Dessner Helped Shape Mumford and Sons' New Sound

Just a few days ago, Mumford and Sons delighted fans with the announcement of their forthcoming third album, Wilder Mind. With that news, they revealed that it would be a departure in sound, featuring more drums and electric guitar and less of their signature banjo. The band’s Ben Lovett attributes much of that change to working with the National’s Aaron Dessner at his Brooklyn studios.

“We met Aaron touring around, just on the circuit,” Lovett told NME. “We’ve been huge fans of the National for ages. All of us, individually have got a very personal attachment to their music. We ended up being complete super fans. After meeting, Aaron said, ‘Come to my garage in Brooklyn and we’ll make some music.’ It was quite innocent really.”

The English folk-rock outfit then took the songs they recorded with Dessner to producer James Ford in London.

“We didn’t lock ourselves away,” Lovett said. “We’d find ourselves doing a week here, a week there. If I added it up it’d be five weeks, but it was really scattered.”

“We got to a point where we had an idea of what the record was going to be,” he continued. “We had an identity. Some of the songs suddenly felt like they had to be on the record, instead of just being songs that we liked. It’s quite a spectrum of different sounds and songwriting styles.”

Wilder Mind will arrive May 4 via Glassnote Records. It follows Mumford and Sons’ 2009 debut, Sigh No More, and 2012’s Babel.