Back to basics: Spoon with a new rock album Spoon's tenth album, "Lucifer on the Sofa," is arguably the band's purest rock 'n' roll output to date. After more than a decade, it's the first album the band has recorded in their hometown of Austin. Spoon's rawest and loudest songs were written and produced over the past two years. The first single is called "The Hardest Cut" and is a raw, classic rock song. "Lucifer on the Sofa" was intended to be a kind of "back to basics" album with a hard edge. However, at least four future Spoon classics were created: "Wild," "The Devil & Mister Jones," "The Radio," and "The Hardest Cut." While Spoon's last album, "Hot Thoughts" (2017), was dominated by drum machines and synthesizers, the band fell in love with the raw and raucous live sound of their songs during the accompanying tour. "I liked the direction we'd gone in with 'Hot Thoughts'—it had a certain style and was new territory for us—but we kept noticing on the road that the live versions of the songs surpassed the album versions," says frontman Britt Daniel. "And that got us thinking: The best rock music isn't about choosing the right patches and triggering samples. It's about what's happening in a room." New paths were forged: In the fall of 2019, Britt Daniel moved back to Austin from Los Angeles. A month later, guitarist and keyboardist Alex Fischel followed him in a car packed to the roof with his equipment. The move to Texas made sense for many reasons: Daniel was born and raised there, and drummer Jim Eno also has his Public Hi-Fi Studio in Austin, which gave the band the luxury of recording the album at their own pace. Above all, however, the band's readjustment helped them break with the sound and spirit of recent Spoon albums. Austin was destined to become the glitch in the Spoon Matrix. The new yet familiar environment, with its young and creative scene, inspired Britt Daniel like nothing she'd experienced in a long time. "We wanted to make a record where we could experience a scene and draw from it," says Daniel. "Alex and I could write all day, then go to Dale Watson's place at the Continental, and then come home and keep writing songs." "The Hardest Cut" was one of the first songs Daniel and Fischel wrote after returning to Texas, influenced by ZZ Top, whose albums they were listening to a lot at the time. This was followed by "Astral Jacket," a ballad inspired by a night at the now-closed Stay Gold nightclub in Austin. Gradually, an album developed with songs whose origins can be traced back to many corners of Daniel's hometown. In collaboration with producer and sound engineer Mark Rankin (Adele, Queens of the Stone Age) and with the help of Dave Fridmann and Justin Raisen, the band's plan was simple: "I came into the studio with a few new songs, and instead of piecing them together from fragments like last time, we said, 'Let's just rehearse.' We'll play the songs live in the studio over and over again until they're finished. And we did it with as few instruments as possible." Halfway through the recording sessions, the pandemic broke out. The studio closed, but Daniel continued writing. "There are songs I wrote last spring, 2020, that I otherwise wouldn't have come up with." New product