Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak are pushing back the release of their Silk Sonic debut album until January 2022, according to their Rolling Stone cover story.
In the new interview, Mars and .Paak explained their decision to postpone the original release of the group’s debut album An Evening With Silk Sonic, which was slated for this fall, and slowly release more songs in the meantime.
“I don’t want to be binge-watched,” Mars said. “We’re really in touch-up mode now. We’ve got the bones of most of the album, so it’s really about touching up parts that need a little more.… grease.” .Paak added with a laugh: “Which could mean redoing the song from scratch!”
After announcing the project, with special guest host Bootsy Collins, in late February, their lead single and Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Leave the Door Open” was released March 5. The single and its highly anticipated follow-up “Skate,” which rolled onto the top 10 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, are the only two singles that have been released ahead of the full-length project.
In order to re-create the ’60s/’70s Philly soul and funk sound for the album, Silk Sonic studied up on old-school material, like drumming magazines, and recorded in a period-appropriate fashion with only a couple of mics in a room full of musicians, much like the atmosphere captured in the “Leave the Door Open” music video. But considering Mars’ meticulous recording (and re-recording and re-re-recording) process, he said they put “pressure” on themselves to release that first single — and even claimed at one point that working on the bridge of “Leave the Door Open” “almost broke the band up.”
“But a deadline is important, because at some point, you gotta say, ‘This is it.’ Otherwise you’re gonna work it till you hate it,” the “Uptown Funk” hitmaker noted. “But there’s a beauty in that — you do have to get sick of it, because that means you put the love and the time and the passion in it, and it’s taxing.”
