Cobra Starship Still Dancing On Third Album

Cobra Starship may be on a headlining tour to promote its sophomore set, 2007's "Viva La Cobra!," but the New York quintet is already hard at work on album number three. 

Guitarist Ryland Blackington tells Billboard.com that between the group's summer shows and the its current jaunt, Cobra Starship hit the studio in its native Manhattan for three weeks of recording with producers S*A*M & SLUGGO, who worked on the band's 2006 debut "While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets." "We wrote (the album) on Warped Tour, and we got home from Japan and the next day we were in the studio," Blackington reports. The group left the studio on Sunday (Oct. 5) in order to tour but, according to Blackington, "got a lot done." 

"We did this one very much from the ground up," says the guitarist, who expects the group to record 15 or 16 songs and put 11 on the final track list. "It's still very dancey but also very poppy. We're using a lot of synthesizers and a lot of different electronic elements we haven't used before." 

The work that has been done is mostly instrumental tracks, according to Blackington. Cobra Starship frontman Gabe Saporta, he says, "blew out his voice on Warped Tour, just from singing every day so early. So we're holding off on some of the vocal stuff. He's sounding great now; he just needed to rest for the beginning of this tour, so we had to strategize." 

Cobra Starship will be on the road until Nov. 30 in North America, then has a British tour in late January and early February.