Panic! At The Disco

First they infected us with A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, then they captivated us with Pretty. Odd. and now it's Panic! At The Disco's turn to remind us why we fell in love with them in the first place. With Vices & Virtues, their first album as a duo, frontman/multi-instrumentalist Brendon Urie and drummer/percussionist Spencer Smith have proven that their best ideas are just starting to get realized—and the disc not only marks the beginning a new era for this Grammy-nominated, Las Vegas-based rock act but in many ways also rings in a new period of musical and emotional growth that shows no signs of subsiding.

Panic! At The Disco began writing the follow-up to 2008's critically acclaimed opus Pretty. Odd. a year-and-a-half ago, however once they entered the studio with acclaimed producer John Feldmann (The Used, Neon Trees) in California, they quickly realized that so many songs were pouring out of them that they literally couldn't stop the process if they tried. "It just felt right to keep at it so we wrote 15 more songs in the studio with John as we were recording," Urie explains. Afterward the band headed to the West Coast to add some "accents with Butch Walker (Weezer, Pink), but ended up pushing out their older material and replacing it with new songs during those sessions, too.

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The result is Vices & Virtues, an album that effortlessly bridges the gap between the energetic pop anthems of their debut A Fever You Can't Sweat Out and the psychedelic leanings of Pretty. Odd. while simultaneously showing a progression that's evident in everything from the album's arrangements to its instrumentation. "It's always been important for us not to copy what we've done in the past," Urie says, "the songs on Vices & Virtues are very stylistically diverse and that happened naturally. There are songs that have a jazz feel and then rock songs with strings and hyper-energetic moments, too. It's really all over the place."

When you look back on Panic! At The Disco's musical career, the one constant is the fact the group has never been the type of act that's easy to categorize and Vices & Virtues continues in that tradition, which is something the band couldn't be more thrilled about. "I love that we don't fit in to one genre because we've never wanted to limit ourselves creatively because that's the best part of being in a band," Urie explains. "When we're making music we're not thinking about pressure or expectations; we're thinking about making the best record possible and giving our fans something they've never heard before," he continues. "If we didn't have our fans' admiration we wouldn't have the creative vision to do any of this so we're eternally grateful to them," Urie summarizes. "It's an amazing feeling to do something like this for as long as we have and still have people out there who are excited to hear it and want to support us. We couldn't ask for anything more."