First Listen: New Panic! At The Disco

Panic! At The Disco is back with a vengeance, and the long missed exclamation point... It seems they've left the folksy stuff in the past and are about to release The Ballad Of Mona Lisa, a very rocking first single from their upcoming album Vices & Virtues. Well, I like this a lot based on a first listen! Should do a lot better than the songs from Pretty.Odd. The single will be available starting February 1st with the new album coming out on March 29th.

Some stats for the band include eight charted songs with Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off as their highest ranked song so far, peaking  at #10 in 2006; and Nine In The Afternoon as their longest chart run with 28 weeks, and a #11 peak in 2008.



More music by Panic! At The Disco

Panic At The Disco Plans "Pretty. Odd." Follow-Up

Panic at the Disco's sophomore album, "Pretty. Odd.," hasn't even been out a month, but guitarist and chief songwriter Ryan Ross is already giving details about the group's next effort.

"We've written a bunch of songs since" recording "Pretty. Odd.," Ross tells Billboard.com, adding that "we've probably got about nine or 10 new songs going right now, so I hope that after our tour and all that, we can do another record."

Ross says the new material "is picking up where we left off. Because ["Pretty. Odd."] was a lot different for a lot of reasons, I think we're kind of finding something we're drawn to, and the stuff so far definitely sounds harder to place to me. I'm not really exactly sure what it sounds like -- I guess sometimes that's a good thing."

According to Ross, Panic plans to spend "the next year" on the road supporting the current album. The Las Vegas quartet is in the midst of headlining the Honda Civic Tour in North America and will also play the Bamboozle Festival on May 4 in East Rutherford, N.J. European dates are on tap for the summer, as well as an Australian run in August and an Asian tour after that.

The guitarist says that Panic is still stoked -- and surprised -- about the early showing of "Pretty. Odd.," which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 after its March 25 release. "We didn't really know what to expect from this," Ross notes. "There was this joke, 'cause we were No. 2 here and some other countries, and we weren't No. 1 anywhere the first week. So it was like, 'Always the bridesmaid, never the bride...'

"But we didn't expect to even be that high, anyway. That stuff is far beyond anything we thought we'd have as far as success, so we just kind of have fun with it."

Panic recently shot a video for "The Green Gentleman (Things Have Changed), the second single from "Pretty. Odd." and follow-up to "Nine in the Afternoon." The new single will be commercially released on May 2.

Source: Billboard.com

Panic At The Disco: The Circus Leaves Town

Given the radical changes that Panic at the Disco has made to its image during the course of the last year, it's hard not to read the lyrics to its new album's opening song as a pre-emptive strike against critics. "Oh, how it's been so long/we're so sorry we've been gone/we were busy writing songs/for you," bassist Jon Walker sings, by way of apology for the two-and-a-half-year lag between 2005's "A Fever You Can't Sweat Out" and the new "Pretty. Odd.," due this week via Fueled by Ramen/Atlantic.

Then, he launches into lines meant to comfort fans who have no doubt noticed their favorite band now looks less like Queen and more like the Kinks: "You don't have to worry cause we're still the same band." Lyricist/guitarist Ryan Ross describes the song as "a lighthearted way to make an important statement."

But despite Ross' insistence that things in Panic-land are business as usual, the fact is, a number of things have changed since the band burst on the scene in 2005, resplendent in layers of makeup and surrounded by circus performers. The band shed one member (bassist Brent Wilson) and replaced him with Walker. The members traded their Hedi Slimane-style black suits for vests, cravats and floral patterns.

And perhaps most crucially, they toned down the bombastic, glammy sound of their first record, replacing it with a stripped-down approach that, at times, recalls the Beatles and Bright Eyes. Also gone: the exclamation point from its name. "Dropping the exclamation point was our way of drawing a line in the sand," Ross says. "We have a new record and we feel like a new band. We were all tired of it, and we went ahead and got rid of it."

Source: Billboard.com