From Pitchfork.com today… Maximo Park’s frontman Paul Smith discuss their new record, which I’m eagerly awaiting. Their debut album, “A Certain Trigger” was my album of 2005- a fantastic mix of post-punk riffs, moving lyrics and artistic vision. Roll on 2007.

The record, currently untitled, is expected to be 12-13 tracks long, and, as mentioned above, will feature production by Gil Norton. When asked about the switch from Paul Epworth (aka Phones, and producer of MP’s last disc, A Certain Trigger) to Norton, Smith explained, “With Paul we wanted to use somebody who hadn’t done anything before. We didn’t know that he sort of blew up in the way that he did as far as the Futureheads and Bloc Party records, and he seems to be very much a very popular man in the current music scene. We wanted to use somebody who didn’t tell us what to do and didn’t think that they knew everything about music, and would have a particular sound.

“For the next record, we just felt like we’ve been playing for the past couple of years and our live show is pretty big. It’s really explosive and emotional as far as we’re concerned, and we want to capture some of that on the record, and have the record feeling a little bit more like five guys in a room, blasting stuff out…We tried to get a lot of energy on the first record, and we did, but it was more of a sort of uptight crackly energy, and if the last record was a slap in the face, we wanted this one to be a bit of a punch in the gut.”

And this punch in the gut is well on its way– Maxïmo Park and Norton already knocked pre-production and drums and bass off the list. “Before we went into the studio, we thought we had loads of good songs, and we still do, but we thought that they were probably a bit closer to being finished than they actually were,” Smith commented. “We had like 20, maybe 21 songs, and we went into the studio in Newcastle…with Gil…We took like two weeks to play the songs through and realize which ones were going to go on the record and which ones we were going to need to work harder on. And it’s a testament to the songs that we don’t really want to use any of them for B-sides. We feel like at some point in time they’re going to be massive songs for us, personally speaking. They’re going to be possibly on the third record.

When Gil came in to do pre-production, his enthusiasm for certain ones and his acknowledgment that some of them were a little underdeveloped really helped us focus.”

With a tour on its way, the Park hope to finish recording by late October. After that, they will sort out artwork and try to release a single in January and the album in March. “That’s what I’m aiming for,” Smith said. “And I’ll sort of knock a few heads at the record company if it doesn’t go my way.” Dude knows what he wants! Don’t mess, Warp Records!

Although the album lacks a title at the moment, several songs do not. Track titles include “Russian Literature” (”about meeting somebody in Russian literature”), “Girls Who Play Guitar” (”a fun song…probably personally quite depressing”), “Books From Boxes” (”quite possibly just about one of the best songs we’ve ever written. I just can’t wait for people to hear it in its fully recorded version, because again it’s a quite personal song, but I always try and write lyrics about personal things, but in a way that people have never heard it termed before”), “Nosebleed” (played live recently, “one of the key tracks” on the new record), “By the Monument” (”a song about waiting”), and “Our Velocity,” a prospective single. In fact, Smith compared that last track there to…wait for it…”a spaceship exploding.”

“It sounds like a hit to me,” he went on. “But I’m in the band, so what do I know?…I do air guitar and air keyboard. It’s going to have to be pretty immense to shift that from our first single.”

Lyrically, Smith believes the songs are becoming more descriptive. “You can only do so much and you don’t want to reveal too much about yourself because it just becomes a bit…freakish,” he elaborated. “Not that it has already. I hope not, anyway.”