Selling out major venues from coast to coast simply by word of mouth, The Glitch Mob has become a festival favorite, rocking crowds from Lollapalooza to Red Rocks to upcoming key slots at Coachella and Ultra with their visceral, innovative performances. “Pairing the richness and headiness of the best dance music with the head-nodding backbeats of hip-hop, they only aim to move you, and they by and large succeed,” raved the Los Angeles Times. And this spring, the L.A.-based trio embarks on their first full nationwide tour in support of The Glitch Mob’s debut album release Drink the Sea, due May 25 on the band’s own Glass Air label. Drink The Sea represents The Glitch Mob’s transformation up from the underground into a more widescreen vision: from the cryptic cover art (courtesy Sonny Kay, famed for his work with Mars Volta) to the kaleidoscopic dimension of the music inside, Drink The Sea evokes a voyage into the unexpected—including sonic waters previously unexplored by the band itself. Then again, The Glitch Mob “sound” has always been a continually mutating concept, always pushing new boundaries as the group evolves. Drink The Sea arrives after years of intermittent yet acclaimed releases—spanning widely passed-around Internet mixtapes like the infamous Crush Mode (“Grab the Crush Mode mixtape. One of the first things to really get my blood going,” raved New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones) to triumphant official remixes for TV On The Radio, Ed Banger’s Krazy Baldhead and Evil Nine featuring El-P. As such, The Glitch Mob and its members even held the top two spots on XLR8R’s “50 Best MP3s of 2008” over the likes of Hercules and Love Affair and the Kills, and their tracks have enjoyed heavy rotation on Mary Anne Hobbs’ taste-making BBC Radio 1 show. Drink The Sea represents a musical sea change for the band, however, combining the thundering percussive power of their live show with the relentlessly experimental ambition of the group’s core producer/instrumentalists Justin Boreta, Ed Ma, and Josh Mayer. “It’s definitely not just a collection of random club bangers,” Mayer explains. “We made this album with very little, if almost none, of our traditional studio production tricks,” Ma adds. “We wanted it to sound like us, but without gimmicks—no glitches, crazy edits or bizarre effects. There aren’t even any samples—all the sounds were created by us making them.” “Admittedly, there’s now a cognitive dissonance with our name,” Boreta adds. “Our modus operandi has stayed the same, though: however the songs are made, we’ve always just wanted to fragment music in a fresh way, to make sounds no one’s heard before.”