It could be hard to compute this shocker but it’s been ten years since Jason Young has released an album under the moniker Heartour, 2011’s Submarine Sounds.  Over this span, though, Young was fully engaged with his indie-pop side project The Ruse’s momentous opportunity to tour worldwide with Muse as their opener three separate times.  Once The Ruse went on hiatus, Young took it upon himself to dust off Heartour.  Released last May, the single “R U IN” showcased a dynamic electronica environment.

Divert The Asteroid fully heralds the return of Heartour with five songs crafted during a year without any certainties. Lead single “Little Waves”, which is released today, arrives like a shot of lemonade squeezed from this lemon of the past year, pulling the pop liveliness of the late Daft Punk with the club worship of LCD Soundsystem.

For some artists, the spark for a record comes from a chord or a lyric. For Heartour’s Jason Young, it started with an image. Specifically, three album covers sketched in a notebook before a single bar had been written. This approach is not unusual for Young, who has always looked to eclectic visuals to inspire his music. Growing up in small-town Connecticut just an hour away from the lights of New York City, the riot of the city’s colors and sounds lured Young not only to the metropolis but also into indie-pop band The Ruse.

Eventually, the ideas in that notebook began to take shape, away from the rock stylings of his day job with The Ruse to the more eccentric, kaleidoscopic synth-pop that became Heartour. Young began pulling double duty, setting out to complete the albums that he sketched out initially with Three dropping in 2003, Five in 2006, and Ate in 2009. It was on these solo records that Young began to solidify what Heartour would sound like, and the ways in which it would differ from his previous projects.

Photo Credit: Elli Lauren