Whitney is back in a kind of big all caps way to announce the new album SPARK. It drops September 16 via Secretly Canadian, and to announce its coming, the Chicago duo shared the lead single, “REAL LOVE,” along with an extensive set of 2022 tour dates. Tickets are available here.

SPARK comes on the heels of the cover album 2020, Candid, and is the studio suite of 2019 Turned forever. Guitarist Max Kakacek and drummer Julien Ehrlich struggled with these songs at first, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic that took Kakacek’s grandfather away in December 2020. But ultimately the endless lockdowns are become, if not a blessing, at least a godsend for the writing process.

“We had time to just sit back and watch the body of work grow in real time,” Ehrlich said in a statement. “We were just piling louder and louder songs on top of each other.” Kakacek added, “Our favorite way to make records, the way we made the first one.”

But that doesn’t mean the sound is the same. Whitney’s psych-folk aesthetic evolved on “REAL LOVE,” with lightly filtered keyboards and crisp drums pushed to the forefront of the mix like you might hear in hip-hop or dance. “Max and I wrote ‘REAL LOVE’ in June 2021 right after moving back to Chicago,” Ehrlich said. “I was experiencing heightened levels of anxiety and panic as the whole city emerged from lockdown. For as long as I can remember, I’ve run and cured my anxiety on my own, but for some reason felt like it was time to dive straight into it.