OK Go Channel Prince and Led Zeppelin on New Album

After OK Go performs on 'The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien' on Friday, Jan. 8, the band will jet off to the UK to launch a European tour on Jan. 11, the very day the Chicago power pop quartet's latest album, 'Of the Blue Colour of the Sky,' is released there. Singer Damian Kulash tells Spinner that the record, which is released in the US one day later, was deeply influenced by heavy touring, which caused him to take stock of his song writing.

"We toured for 31 months without stopping," he says. "I came home and tried to write a big blammo chord. Like, turn the amp to 11 and write a big power chord that tears your scalp off. The thrill of that after 700 days of shows in a row didn't do much. I was like, well, that's boring."

'Of the Blue Colour,' which doesn't sacrifice OK Go's characteristic bristling hooks, also reflects personal and worldwide gloom, he says. "We were all going through a tough time personally and globally. Firstly, the presidential campaign, the chaos. Then the recession. The world seemed so f---ed."

"It's a very dark record," Kulash continues. "It is more introspective feeling, but that also comes from the way we made it -- sort of from the ground up rather than the top down. Ten years ago, I sat down and said 'Why doesn't the world make stadium rock anymore?' So, I wrote a song like that. Now, I can't work that way."

In short, Kulash was power-chorded out. "Having expended that particular thrust, we sort of got back to how we listen to music, rather than how we learned to make it. There are a lot of '80s Prince influences on this record. You can almost hear exactly what I was listening to when I was 12 years old. There's a little bit of jangly on-the-porch Led Zeppelin, a bit of spacey electro Depeche Mode and there's a lot of Prince's 'Purple Rain'."