Cold War Kids

On their sixth album LA Divine, Cold War Kids pay tribute to Los Angeles and all its strange glory. The follow-up to 2014’s Hold My Home — featuring the gold-certified single “First” – the band’s latest is slightly tongue-in-cheek in its title. “In many ways LA is the least divine city, the most hedonistic and irreverent and disconnected from history,” says Cold War Kids singer/guitarist/pianist Nathan Willett. Still, LA Divine embodies the Long Beach-bred band’s endless fascination with their adopted hometown.

For Cold War Kids – whose lineup also includes drummer Joe Plummer, multi-instrumentalist Matthew Schwartz, and guitarist David Quon – that rejuvenation follows a creative rebirth of sorts. As Willett explains, the band took a more pop-informed and decidedly inventive approach to the making of LA Divine. “From the start of the band, our tastes have always been very backward-looking in terms of the tones and sounds and instrumentation we’re working with,” he says. “On this album we wanted to embrace something more modern, because in many ways the most creative sounds happening right now are coming from the world of pop and out of that influence we’ve ironically created what sounds like our most rock record yet.”