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After A Delay, Foster The People Is Back In Business

Foster The People will return with its third, as-yet-untitled album this summer. In the meantime, the L.A. band has just released three new songs.
Neil Krug
/
Courtesy of the artist
Foster The People will return with its third, as-yet-untitled album this summer. In the meantime, the L.A. band has just released three new songs.

The L.A. band Foster The People seemed to come out of nowhere back in 2011, when its song "Pumped Up Kicks" rocketed into intense, summer-long ubiquity. Torches, the album that spawned "Pumped Up Kicks," was a Grammy-nominated best-seller, and singer Mark Foster and drummer Mark Pontius performed a hugely popular Tiny Desk concert. Everything fell into place quickly.

But sustaining that success hasn't come easy. A follow-up album, 2014's Supermodel, charted well but didn't produce another huge single. Bassist Cubbie Fink left Foster The People the following year, and a third album has been in various stages of tinkering for two years now.

Finally, though, this month has brought a flurry of Foster The People news, starting with the announcement of a summer world tour and continuing today with the release of three new songs: "Doing It For The Money" (they're opposed, by the way), "Pay The Man" and "SHC." Look for more music to follow soon, and in the meantime, enjoy all three new songs below.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)