Junior Boys Channeling Canadian Director Norman McLaren

For their third album, Canadian electro-pop duo Junior Boys looked to one of their own -- film maker Norman McLaren. 'Begone Dull Care,' the title of their new record (due April 7), comes from the 1950 McLaren film of the same name, but Junior Boy Jeremy Greenspan says that the album is more of a reflection of his body of work, and not just the one title.

"I was becoming more obsessed with McLaren's movies, and so he became, in my mind, an ideal artist," Greenspan tells Spinner. "He was into exploring new techniques in his field, which I think I try to do. And the fact that he was Canadian was a big thing for me -- He sort of set the tone for Canadian art in the '50s. All of those things conspired [on this]."

Compared to their prior two albums, Greenspan sees 'Begone Dull Care' as a much more "analog" presentation of their music, a product of moving further away from solely relying on computers and more on analog synthesizers. "McLaren was a very analog kind of guy, and I wanted everything to have a feel that it was done by hand," he explains. "For me, electronic music loses something when you literally can't hear the electricity."

Along with getting out of the digital box, the tracks are noticeably longer this time; paired down to just eight songs, only two stay within the four-minute mark, with the others stretching past six minutes, featuring deliberately long intros and outros. "That's where we really wanted to push the feeling of experimentation," Greenspan explains. "We felt like we needed all this time to make them unfold like the way they're supposed to."

Junior Boys will bring 'Begone Dull Care' to life this spring, joining forces with Max Tundra on the road. They'll kick things off in Toronto on March 28th.