You don’t have to shut up, but you’ll probably be dancing while listening to WALK THE MOON‘s new album.

The band’s first record in four years, titled HEIGHTS, is out today. As frontman Nicholas Petricca tells ABC Audio, the album deals with two main themes.

“Perseverance, really sticking it out,” Petricca says of the first. “Having that connection to the light at the end of the tunnel, believing that it’s there when you can’t see it.”

The second, Petricca explains, deals with “self-love or self-acceptance.”

“Just coming into a greater awareness and appreciation of who we are, as people and individuals, and that the imperfect, in-between perfect stuff is actually where the juice is, where so much of the beauty is,” he says.

To communicate those themes, HEIGHTS employs lyrics that paint a picture of moving higher in songs such as “Rise Up,” “Giants” and the title track. In that sense, the album hearkens back to past WTM hits including “Shut Up and Dance” and “One Foot,” both of which used the idea of physical movement to overcome mental obstacles.

The idea of bringing movement into lyrics, Petricca shares, is something that regularly comes up in the songwriting process.

“Often I’ll be, like, ‘There’s just there’s not enough movement, there’s not enough inertia,'” he says. “I need to have an image, need to have something visceral, something with motion and action.” 

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