Wednesday 13th January
The Ting Tings have named their new album after a massage parlour near their Berlin studio, the band have revealed.
Kunst means ‘art’ in German and is set for release later this year.
“Just round the corner to our studio there’s a massage parlour, it’s called Massage Kunst,” Jules De Martino told the NME.
“It’s Massage Art, basically. We took a picture of that and sent it to our label, saying this is the title of the album. They went berserk.”
Of the album’s sound, De Martino added: “We listened back to some of the demos and we thought, hold on a minute, this is sounding too much like we’re rocking out live.
“We bought a couple of old weird synths in New York and smuggled them in our suitcases back to Berlin and they started to come strong on the music.”
‘Help’ and ‘Hands’ have been confirmed as titles of tracks on the album.
Mystery Jets have also given a name to their new album, Radio 1 reports.
The follow-up to Twenty One will be released in March and is called Luminescence.
The band have been previewing their new material undercover, with Blaine Harrison telling Steve Lamacq: “A big thing that worked well for us was playing the songs live before we went into the studio.
“We spent a couple of weeks out in Berlin playing people’s art spaces and pubs, and bedrooms, basically wherever we could play, but not announcing who we were.”
Harrison also revealed that the band have been working with a bagpipe player.
“We found him on Google, he was cheap,” he said. “He came along and started playing the Star Wars theme on his midi bagpipes while wearing a penguin mask.”
Finally, Klaxons frontman Jamie Reynolds has revealed that the band’s new album has been inspired by the year 2012.
Recording sessions for the follow-up to 2007’s Myths of the Near Future have stalled so far, with the band already going through several producers.
However, Reynolds believes that they have now found direction, saying that 2012 will bring the “coming of the fifth or sixth sun” and that the event will bring people together.
“We believe in the collective consciousness and the world shift, and the dissolving of boundaries and the bringing together of humanity, and everybody having the same objective and living together in harmony. That’s what we’re going for,” he told the NME.