Stir the Blood by The Bravery

Stir the Blood, the Bravery's third album, came out on Island Records on December 1, 2009, and it was made well away from the New York City that spawned them. The five-piece headed into the woods upstate and set up at Dreamland Recording Studios, an abandoned church turned studio where the B-52's had made "Love Shack" and the Pixies had once worked. Sam Endicott moved into the house next door for months and co-produced with John Hill, building songs like "Slow Poison" and "I Am Your Skin" out of riffs the band had banked on the road behind The Sun and the Moon.

Endicott admitted he was angry when he wrote a lot of it, and there's a dark streak in the words, but the music refuses to sulk: Michael Zakarin's guitar, John Conway's keyboards, Mike Hindert's bass and Anthony Burulcich's drums keep the dance-floor post-punk pulse racing. It was their last studio album before a long silence; Endicott confirmed a hiatus in 2014, and they came back in 2021.

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