Coming off their tour supporting their latest album, 2023’s The Maybe Man, the Met brothers had intended to take a break from writing new AJR music. However, as band member Ryan Met tells ABC Audio, they were “hit with a lot of inspiration all of a sudden.”
“We realized we were suppressing a lot of stuff,” Ryan tells ABC Audio. “I think that we found that it’s a little bit our, I don’t know, it’s kind of our duty to ourselves to put it into song form.”
The songs would go on to form a new EP called What No One’s Thinking, which Ryan describes as “not only the most honest music we’ve made, but like, the most direct.”
“It feels literally like a diary entry,” Ryan says.
Indeed, the songs on What No One’s Thinking are often blunt and explicitly personal — the cut “I’m Sorry You Went Crazy,” for example, is about a frank conversation with a relative. Even the track “A Dog Song,” which is sung from the perspective of a dog, isn’t exactly as whimsical and cheery as you might expect.
“The song is about your dog watching you, or their owner, go through something really difficult and not really know how to help and not really understand what they’re going through in general,” says Jack Met.
Multiple tracks on What No One’s Thinking broach the subject of marriage, reflecting how AJR approaches writing a “love song.”
“We’ve never been interested in just writing a love song, ’cause it’s just been done a million times,” Ryan says. “It would feel a little performative to … it’d feel a little, honestly, disingenuous of like, ‘All your problems will be solved by falling in love!'”
What No One’s Thinking is out now.
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