Vitals by Mutemath

Vitals, Mutemath's fourth full-length, arrived on November 13, 2015, and it was the New Orleans band's first record on Wojtek Records, their own imprint, after they'd parted ways with Warner Bros. It nearly came out very differently. Work on the follow-up to 2011's Odd Soul began in 2012, but at the end of 2013 Paul Meany and company listened back and decided the whole thing simply wasn't it. So they tore it up and started over, vowing to write a new song every day from January 1, 2014 until the album told them what it had to say.

What came out is leaner and shinier, the sound of a band testing how little it could play and still hit hard: synth pulses, elastic grooves from Darren King's kit and Meany's voice floating over the gleam. It's also the first Mutemath studio album with Todd Gummerman, who'd come aboard in 2011.

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