Matching their fascinating, enigmatic album titles and lyrics, the Danes’ music follows its own unique path, transporting a pure-pop sensibility through ever-evolving scenery and around exhilarating hairpin bends, making music as layered and expansive as it is charismatic and melodic. 

Following Mew’s fifth album No More Stories Are Told Today, I'm Sorry They Washed Away // No More Stories, The World Is Grey, I'm Tired, Let's Wash Away, they are releasing a career-defining record, this time with the much shorter title of +-. The symbols capture the extremities of the band’s DNA: the pop ingenuity - Mew could be the new A-Ha if so desired - and the ambitious expansion of progressive giants such as Genesis and Yes. “It’s like a photograph that’s been soaking in chemicals for a long time, to exaggerate the contrast,” reckons singer/spokesman Jonas Bjerre, on behalf of guitarist Bo Madsen, drummer Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen and returning bassist Johan Wohlert. “It represents the far regions of what Mew can be.”

At the spectrum’s end that Pitchfork has labelled Mew’s “dream thunderstorm pop”, there is ‘The Night Believer’ and ‘Satellites’. ‘My Complications’, ‘Interview The Girls’ and a particularly frenetic ‘Witness’ also tap Mew’s more accessible side, but even then, the music is deliciously skewed. “Some people view songwriting as a craft involving an acoustic guitar, candelight, red wine and thinking about a girl you like,” says Bjerre. “That’s been done to death and doesn’t interest us. Yet sometimes, in spite of everything we try out, it can be just like that! But we prefer it happens by accident.”