OK Go On New Album ‘And The Adjacent Possible’
Since their inception OK Go has been something more than a band and something different from an art project. With a career that includes award-winning videos, New York Times op-eds, collaborations with pioneering dance companies, tech giants, NASA, animators and Muppets, and an experiment that encoded their music on actual strands of DNA, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved.
Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Timothy Nordwind, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of transformation and continue to add to a curriculum vitae filled with experimentation in a variety of mediums. OK Go’s work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, and their achievements have been recognized with twenty-one Cannes Lions, twelve CLIOs, three VMAs, two Webbys, The Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, and a Grammy. The band has also partnered with the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas to create OK Go Sandbox, an educational non-profit that provides free resources to teachers that use OK Go’s videos as starting points to teach STEAM concepts.
Now, OK Go return with brand new album And The Adjacent Possible and Damian Kulash talks to Hi Fi Way about it and the possibility of a tour in 2026.
Congratulations on the new album, you must be feeling relieved now that it’s finally done and out?
It’s very relieving! The last bit right before a record comes out is all business, but I just want the music to spread its wings and fly. Once you let go of the music, it’s not yours anymore, it belongs to everyone, and it will do for them whatever it will do. That’s exciting and deeply satisfying.
Eleven years between albums is a long time. Did you start feeling the pressure as the years rolled by,wondering if it would ever happen, or even doubting yourself?
We didn’t intend to take a hiatus. We toured a lot on our last album, made ambitious videos that took time, then our guitarist had kids, then I had kids, then there was the pandemic, and then I directed a film, which took a couple of years too. We had been working on ideas, getting demos ready, playing around with songs, but suddenly eight years had passed. Time went too quickly.
Some of that was simply growing up. The hiatus, in part, was because we wanted to be good fathers. That brought a wonderful perspective to everything. When we finally returned to making this record, it was the first time we had ever taken our foot off the pedal long enough to gain perspective on what we do. That gave us extra confidence, like, oh yeah, this is what we like. We weren’t trying to prove anything anymore. Our flag was planted a long time ago, we didn’t need to plant it again. We know what we do.
Taking your foot off the accelerator, did that create anxiety? The band is what you know best, so did shifting focus cause any uncertainty?
Having twins meant there was no time to think about anything but how to get sleep. Plus, my wife and I directed The Beanie Bubble for Apple. It was a massive project, a five hundred and fifty person crew, a fifty-day shoot, two solid years working on an art project with a bigger budget and reach than anything I’d ever done. So I never had time to sit around questioning myself, I was just doing.
I loved making the film, but when it was done, the first thing I wanted to do was sit between a pair of speakers where all that mattered was whether or not I liked that sound. Making a feature film is complicated. There’s a lot to be proud of, but it involves a huge group of people. Just sitting down with a guitar or keyboard and asking myself, is that beautiful or not? and having that be the only thing I needed to do that day, that was a wonderful feeling.
Once you started thinking about the album, did things move quickly, writing songs, pulling it all together?
Yes, we’re not the fastest writers in general, but this album’s lyrics felt clearer. I fought less with them than ever before. I don’t know exactly why, I think perspective played a big role. Having children taught me a lot about myself, it removed ego from the equation. It wasn’t just seeing the world through my kids’ eyes, it was realising that emotions I thought I knew inside and out were actually so much bigger.
Love, for instance, I spent my whole life chasing it, convinced I understood it deeply. Then I had kids, and suddenly it was like finding a hidden door in a familiar space, opening it up to a vast, unexplored world. It was the same with wonder, joy, anxiety, sadness. Having kids re-framed the way I saw everything, and that made songwriting much easier.
Did that influence the songwriting? Do you think you’d have gotten the same result without this life experience?
Definitely not lyrically. Some writers, like Dylan, start with a poem and turn it into a song. I’m the opposite. I play around with music, with sounds, until they accidentally tip into an emotional space. It’s magic, sometimes the same three chords are just boring, sometimes they’re amazing. No pattern explains it, it’s all about what matters inside you at that moment. Once I find that emotional core, then I figure out what it means and what lyrics will align with it, without flattening it.
If you have a sad song and the lyrics are just about sadness, it kills the depth. The words need to add another dimension, to pull the emotion somewhere new, give it tension. For this album, that tension came from my experience of fatherhood. The way my emotions moved through the world were shaped entirely by that. But there aren’t songs about being a dad.
How was it when you finally got back in the studio with the guys again, working on these songs?
Oh, it was wonderful. Tim, our bassist, and I have known each other since we were eleven years old, so we’re more family than we are friends, and more friends than we are a business. Just getting to spend our days hanging out is already a gift. Even more so when the project at hand is making something that excites us.
Was the studio experience a challenging one, or did the album come together the way you expected?
We recorded most of it in this room, my home studio, and mixed it at Dave Fridmann’s studio. The only downside was that without the boundary of running out of time, we could just keep going. I’m sure that contributed to how long it took, without a clear deadline or set studio hours, we just kept working.
Sonically, how does this album compare to Hungry Ghosts or earlier records?
In some ways, I feel like I’m the worst person to assess this, because I’m in the eye of the storm. But from my perspective, this is the most live and organic record we’ve made in a long time, it reflects the mix tape quality of our band. We’ve always been a little stylistically all over the map, and instead of cramming that into a single box, this album breathes and moves in its own weird way. What I’m hearing from fans, which I think is a good thing, is that it feels like all our former albums wrapped into one. Like a summary of everything we’ve been so far. That makes sense to me, it’s not about planting a flag, but embracing who we’ve always been.
Is there always pressure to have another single like Here It Goes, to repeat past success?
Yeah, and I think taking our foot off the accelerator helped with that. You can’t chase the music industry, especially now. The only thing that truly works is the thing that only you could make, the thing that is uniquely yours. Trying to do what’s cool right now, or giving people exactly what they expect, never really works.
How did it feel listening to the album start to finish once it was done?
Relieving, honestly. My biggest worry was whether it would feel like a cohesive body of work. The record jumps from Phil Spector 1962 to whiffs of Daft Punk in 2002, with a lot of Nile Rodgers-era Bowie in between. It’s all over the place, something that could easily feel disjointed. Dave Fridmann’s mixing really helped, it has a cohesive sonic palette that ties it all together. Listening to it now, I’m just relieved that it feels like one album, not like a greatest hits collection or something scattered across different eras.
Are you looking to tour Australia at some point?
Yes. We hoped to get to Australia this summer, but logistics didn’t work out. We will definitely come to Australia at some point, I’m guessing 2026. Our tour starts soon, I literally just came from rehearsal. First shows are a week and a half away.
What’s the energy like in rehearsals?
It’s wonderful. A little nerve-wracking, though, figuring out how to play all these songs with eight hands.
In the studio, we chase sounds down alleyways and sometimes end up using a broken ukulele to get the right tone, things that don’t always translate live.
Interview By Rob Lyon
And The Adjacent Possible is out now. Get yours here…
