Just over 5 months ago, Umphrey’s McGee released a new studio record titled it’s not us. In the wee hours of Friday morning, the group shared news of a previously unannounced follow-up, it’s you, which is now available. Umphrey’s recorded the tracks on it’s you, at the same time as the songs on it’s not us (when taken together the two record titles offer a nod to George Constanaza’s Seinfeld break-up line: “it’s not you, it’s me”). The new record contains 10 tracks, 7 of which the band has yet to perform live (along with current staples “Attachments” and “Upward,” while “In The Black” was briefly tabled due to a new arrangement that appears on the record).

As Umphrey’s McGee keyboard player Joel Cummins explains in an article on Relix.com, “This is 20 years into Umphrey’s McGee, and not only do we have one new album of music, we have two albums of music. We’re more fired up than we ever have been about the stuff that we’re putting out. I think that these two albums really do complement each other, but at the same time they’re two completely separate pieces of art that stand on their own. I think you can kind of tell they’re from the same era, but at the same time they’re very much their own pieces of creativity. They’re time capsules of where we are at this time, and that we’re having a lot of fun being creative together, getting out there and doing it.”

The band’s Brendan Bayliss comments on the stealth nature of the release: ““We’d all sworn ourselves to secrecy,” he explains. “I finally told my parents on Mother’s Day. I felt that I had to tell my mother because Ryan Stasik wrote a song that has some foul language in it [“Hanging Chads”] and I had to give her the fair warning. So that was the first time I told them but I didn’t tell everyone in my family because I wanted to keep it a shock to everybody and be able to say, ‘Oh, guess what? Here’s a whole new album’ and the only way that happens is if nobody knows. I have a couple of close friends that I definitely did not say anything to. There were a couple people in the organization that we didn’t even tell.”

For more on the story of it’s not us check out the Relix March cover story, while the piece on it’s you appears here.

it’s you track listing:

1 Triangle Tear
2 What We Could Get
3 Push & Pull
4 In The Black
5 Xmas at Wartime
6 Seasons
7 Nether
8 Hanging Chads
9 Attachments
10 Upward