Animal Joy will be in your hands in a scant three weeks. Pre-orders are up on subpop.com. Pre-ordering from Sub Pop will get you demos of four Animal Joy songs and an exclusive original song, “Escape from Holy Mountain,” plus stickers! In addition, Sub Pop will be donating $2 of each pre-order to the Audubon Society on our behalf.

Vinyl lovers: early purchases from SP or your friendly local record store will net you the “Loser Edition” colored vinyl, blood red swirled into black.

We’ve released a third track from the record, “You as You Were.” Give it a listen below and download it free!

Meanwhile, the tour begins February 6. We’ve added some headlining US dates – check out the tour page or the list on the homepage. Keep an eye out for more dates in the near future.

Our new album, Animal Joy, will be released by Sub Pop records on February 14, 2012 in the USA and Feb 27th in the rest of the world. It’s a very different beast (no pun intended) from the Island Arc albums, but we’re really happy with it. We recorded it in Austin with Danny Reisch and mixed it in Connecticut with Peter Katis. You can read our steadfast ally Gerard Cosloy’s (admittedly promotional) summary of the record here.

If you haven’t heard it yet, listen to and download lead-off track “Breaking the Yearlings.”

And speaking of old allies, we’ll be touring with our friend (and former tour manager) Sharon Van Etten in February (dates here).

Stay tuned for more release information, artwork, and dates here and overseas, which we’ll be announcing soon.

For more frequent (and trivial) updates, you can also follow our Facebook page.