After the Disco by Broken Bells

After the Disco, the second album from Broken Bells, came out on Columbia on January 31, 2014, and it finds Danger Mouse and James Mercer leaning even harder into their shared taste for velvet-lined, late-night pop. Brian Burton, as Danger Mouse is known offstage, produced; the two of them wrote the songs together; and a choir of four voices plus the Angel City String Orchestra, all seventeen players of it, lend the whole thing a plush sheen.

The result sounds like a mirror ball spinning in an empty room: Mercer, better known as the singer and guitarist of The Shins, floats his voice over Burton's glossy, melancholy grooves. "Holding On for Life", out as a single in 2013 and sitting third on the record, is the hook that reels you in, the title track gets the dance floor moving with a tear in its eye, and "Control" twitches and broods.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.