The Cars Confirm New Album Details

The Cars release brand new album Move Like This on 16 May. The album will be preceded by 'Sad Song', the band's first single in nearly 20 years.

Produced by R.E.M. cohort Jacknife Lee, the album will be a typically innovative affair. It will also be the first time that the surviving four members, Ric Ocasek, Greg Hawkes, Elliot Easton and David Robinson, will have worked together since Ben Orr died in 2000.

"I just thought, it’s been a long time since I played with these guys," Ocasek says, "but they’re the ones that will do the best job.  They’re the ones that I wouldn’t have to explain things to, they wouldn’t have to get used to the way I write, they’re already inundated with all that.  I’ll just put out a feeler and see if they’d be interested in doing it."

"It totally clicked immediately," Ocasek continued.  "Everybody got right into it as if we had never stopped playing. After two days I thought, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be cool.’"

"It was very comfortable," Hawkes says, "Everybody just returned to their old sense of humor."

"We definitely wanted to bring a modern slant to it," he continued.  "That’s what’s unique about this record.  We tried hard to keep it from just being a nostalgia thing, which is obviously hard to do, because our whole history is in the past."

Says producer Jacknife Lee -  "The Cars have always had a futuristic sound, and this is something we wanted to keep – tight, taut and lean".

"As a producer, you can't want for anything else," Lee says of collaborating with the band and Ocasek, who he credits as producing some of his favorite albums (Suicide, Weezer, Bad Brains).  "It was one of the best recording experiences I've had.  There's a freshness and clarity to The Cars and Move Like This that most new bands don't have.  That's pretty special."

The Cars will also hit the road this year, with a handful of North American dates confirmed for May.