Acclaimed indie four-piece Tokyo Police Club is hitting the road and has included a Red Deer stop along the way.

They play Bo’s Bar & Grill Sept. 29th.

The band has released a new track My House – the first cut from the band’s forthcoming EP, Melon Collie and the Infinite Radness (Part 2) to be released on Sept. 23rd through Dine Alone Records in Canada.

“Part two! The radness continues. It came together spontaneously, in fits and spurts, starting with My House,” said David Monks. “I wrote this one with my friend Rostam, and I think it embodies the spontaneous nature of the whole EP. Rostam and I have been trading ideas and jamming since we met back in 2007 when both our bands were just babies. One day last year when he stopped by my house to hang, he picked up a guitar and I started singing melodies. In 10 minutes, we had the skeleton of this song.

“Coming down from Forcefield, a lot of things were changing for us as people. We knew we had music to make but didn’t know where it was taking us. So, with each song, we explored new ways of working and just tried to capture the moment. These EP’s let us frame them as honest snapshots rather than a grand statement. With A Lesson in Crime 10 years behind us, it feels like we’ve tapped back into that off the cuff spirit that brought us together in the first place.”

Tokyo Police Club released the first installment of a two-part batch of EP’s this past April. Melon Collie and the Infinite Radness (Part 1) marked the band’s first release since their enterprising and vaulting 2014 LP Forcefield, as well as the 10-year anniversary of their debut EP. The new music sees Tokyo Police Club looking back to the energy and spirit of that formative era while keeping an eye on the future.

In support of their latest EP’s, Tokyo Police Club will be heading on tour this fall for a string of dates with Born Ruffians and the Elwins, followed by an intimate theatre tour in November.

Guitarist Josh Hook said he is looking forward to being on tour with the band and enjoys the adventure that it brings.

“I like that you can go out and play for people that know the words to your songs and especially in Canada we see a lot of familiar faces.”

For Hook, a passion for music came early on.

“I took the lessons that I think everyone takes when they are younger – a little bit of piano and a couple of guitar lessons,” he said. “We grew up in a suburban town and there wasn’t a whole lot to do other than hang out with your friends. As soon as one of your friends got an instrument, everyone else wanted to join in. Once that got going, that is what we did for weekends and summers.”

Hook added his passion for the industry continues.

“It’s creatively satisfying and I’m grateful to be able to still scratch that itch and not have it become formulaic,” he said. “I love the flexibility of it as well.”

Meanwhile, as the years have worn on, Tokyo Police Club continues to defy the odds, having pushed themselves and their art to the limit. Having completed their grandest statement in the form of their fourth and most time-intensive album to date, the boys took a little time away from each other. Monks moved to New York City and put out a solo record, while Greg Alsop returned west to Los Angeles, Graham Wright bunkered down in Toronto to work on a film, and Hook settled in rural Ontario on a patch of land. Enjoying their time apart to recover, experiment, explore, and evolve as people and not just as a band, the foursome reunited for the lengthy Forcefield tour, and during a brief break in the cycle at the end of 2014 they took what Monks refers to as a “New York vacation” together to record two new songs he had written earlier in the year.

“We knew we didn’t want to work like we did on Forcefield, which was two and a half years solidly writing and rehearsing while holed up in a studio in Toronto,” said Alsop. “And we all live in different places now, so that week in New York was our first attempt at experimenting with what happens if we all fly in to be in the same place and decide to work on music together.”

That pair of songs, Ocean and Please Don’t Let Me Down, recaptured the urgency and attitude of their earliest material, all the way back to the A Lesson In Crime EP and 2008’s full-length debut Elephant Shell.

“We’re sort of in a new spot and we’re redefining how we work creatively and as a band,” said Monks. “And with this EP we’re exploring that, and what it’s like to be in different places and to work together as adults and with a time limit, and how that makes things more exciting, and lighter, or more stressful. It brought a new energy and there was a creative time limit to it; we’re more firing it off and trying to capture lightning in a bottle. The band has stayed so flexible and elastic that it keeps going; it’s evolved.”

efawcett@reddeerexpress.com