Thirty Seconds to Mars’ newest album title – This Is War – is more than a just a reference to the band’s personal battles, a commentary on global crises and economic turmoil and homage to their now infamous $30,000,000 lawsuit with Virgin Records. This Is War also represents the result of an 18-month creative battle, fought ferociously, but privately, inside a studio built into the side of a house tucked away in the Hollywood Hills. The result: a triumphant, sonically epic game-changer that builds on the vision laid out in their 2002 self-titled debut and 2005’s multi-platinum A Beautiful Lie.

This Is War is a major leap forward for Thirty Seconds to Mars, one that cements the trio (lead singer and guitarist Jared Leto, drummer Shannon Leto and guitarist Tomo Milicevic) as a world-class arena-crushing rock band. The L.A. Times calls This Is War “combative…sinister…the most confident-sounding thing the band has done.”  Alternative Press echoes the sentiment, giving it four stars and hailing the album as “an artistic triumph for Thirty Seconds To Mars” and Kerrang! Magazine agrees, calling it the band’s “strongest and most accomplished work to date.”

Jared Leto comments: “It took two years, we went to hell and back. At one point, I thought it was going to be the death of us, but it became a transformative experience. It’s not so much an evolution as it is a revolution. It’s a coming of age.”

To guide their journey, Thirty Seconds to Mars enlisted two of the most influential producers in the world: Flood (U2, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins) and Steve Lillywhite (U2, The Rolling Stones, Peter Gabriel).

“Flood has a karmic ability to work with bands in these intense transformational periods of their creative lives,” Jared says. “We knew we were ready for something new, something different, something unexpected. Flood was the perfect person to help guide us down this path.”

“Sonically it’s a new beginning, a rebirth,” Tomo says. “And as a songwriter, Jared was relentless. He went to a place that I’d never seen before.”

Flood and Lillywhite gave the band the freedom and confidence to explore different sounds, textures and ideas. “It’s a process that requires truth, honesty and a lot of hard work,” Flood explained, telling the press that the band set out to make a classic album by pushing themselves to a place they all knew wouldn’t be easy to go to. He added, “Those sorts of things I find very rewarding.” It was a process that began with Flood at the helm and concluded with the reigns in Lillywhite’s hands. The duo succeeded in heightening the emotional power of the songs, revealing themes of faith, morality, vindication, freedom and resurrection in recording their most personal and politically charged project to date.

“Flood began this long journey with us and it was an unforgettable experience. He helped us on this quest to find out more of who we really are as a band and as individual musicians,” says Shannon. “Steve helped us finish, which is often the most difficult part of the recording process. We went to war alongside each of them and came out with love
and respect for both.”

In addition to Jared’s searing, no-holds-barred vocals, propulsive and melodious bass, guitar and keyboards, Shannon’s huge and inventive percussion, and Tomo’s searing six-string, This Is War buzzes with dozens of imaginative effects and indomitable layers of vintage synths. Authentic Tibetan monks chant to begin the album on “Escape” and close the album on “L490,” the voice of a French girl narrates “Night of the Hunter,” and the cry of a wild hawk screams to introduce the first single, “Kings and Queens,” which the band wrote in the same house in South Africa where they recorded their smash Modern Rock single “The Kill.” And that hawk scream is no studio trickery. “The hawk lived
above the house,” explains Jared. “We spent hours waiting for him to appear so we could climb up on the roof and record him live.”

But perhaps the most stunning and profound instrument on the album is the euphoric sound of thousands of Thirty Seconds to Mars fans – a more-than-100,000-strong legion infamously dubbed The Echelon – singing in unison throughout the record. Initially a simple recording experiment, “The Summit” took place at Hollywood’s Avalon Club in April 2009 and was comprised of roughly 1,000 Echelon who traveled from around the world to lend their stomps, shouts, screams, claps and hums to the record. An unmistakable success, Buzznet called this 1000-piece human orchestra “field recordings of fandom” and “almost custom-built to play live.”

The success of the initial Summit quickly manifested into eight additional Summits held around the globe, resulting in tens of thousands of participants. Additionally, the band received a Twitter message from a fan in Iran who couldn’t get to any of the Summits, prompting Jared, Shannon and Tomo to open the experiment even broader. Embracing the digital culture that has for years buoyed the band’s global success, Thirty Seconds to Mars introduced the “Digital Summit” in August 2009 and invited anyone with a computer or mobile recording device and an Internet connection to record sounds and vocals and submit them through TwitVid.  As a result, entries poured in from the U.S.,
Australia, Italy, Germany, France, Japan, Mexico, the U.K., Canada and Iran, giving Thirty Seconds to Mars’ biggest supporters around the world an opportunity to be a part of the new album.

“The Summit was an integral part of the making of this record,” Jared says. “It was an interactive recording experiment that succeeded far beyond our hopes and became a defining element to this album. It was an exciting and unique way for us to share the experience with our family around the world.”

“Kings & Queens,” which emerged as This Is War’s first single, has been called “epic rock at its most affecting” by Billboard and inspired a short film called “The Ride,” directed by Thirty Seconds to Mars video director alum, Bartholomew Cubbins (“The Kill,” “From Yesterday”). The film features a critical mass crank mob movement,
founded with forward-thinking and eco-conscious intentions, and celebrates this amazing community of riders on a nighttime journey from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica, a fitting love letter to the city of Los Angeles, an ever-present character in the band’s history and certainly in the making of This is War. Soaring into Alternative Radio’s top 3 barely a month after its impact, “Kings & Queens” has set the pace for the promise of things to come.

This Is War was released by Virgin Records on December 8.

MARS FACTS:

• Thirty Seconds to Mars have sold more than 3.5 million albums worldwide.
• The band was formed by Jared and Shannon Leto and signed in 1998 to Virgin Records.
• Their videos have been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
• The video for A Beautiful Lie’s title track and fourth single took the band 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
• “From Yesterday” was the first American music video ever shot in the People’s Republic of China.
• Thirty Seconds to Mars have won numerous awards and accolades, including an MTV Video Music Award, three MTV EMA’s, MTV Latin, Asia and Australia Awards, a Fuse Award, and three Kerrang! Awards.
• Thirty Seconds to Mars now boasts nearly 42 million plays on MySpace and more than one million fans on iLike/Facebook.
• A Beautiful Lie produced two Top 5 Modern Rock singles in “From Yesterday” and “The Kill”
• “The Kill” set a record for the longest-running hit in the history of Modern Rock radio when it remained on the national airplay chart for more than 50 weeks following its No. 3 peak in 2006.
• www.abeautifullie.org was created as a bulletin board for educating the public on environmental issues and instructing on how and where to take action.
• The band have played nearly 500 shows around the globe since the 2005 release of A Beautiful Lie, including festival performances at Lollapalooza in the U.S., Pinkpop in the Netherlands, Download and Give It a Name Festivals in the U.K., Germany’s Rock Am Ring/Rock Im Park and Japan’s Summer Sonic.

NEW POLITICS

New Politics have a motto: “Fuck It.” It’s kind of a crass, apathetic motto. But for the Copenhagen band it doesn’t mean giving up. It means taking chances—something they do with reckless abandon. For instance, when the band was on the verge of signing with RCA in November, they realized “If we’re going to become insanely famous in the U.S. we might want to actually live there.” So the three musicians packed up their instruments and recording gear, said “Fuck it” and moved into a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Here’s another example: David and Soren had been writing songs together for over three years (for respective solo albums that have yet to see the light of day) when they realized that they had unintentionally started a band. The pair had experimented with every imaginable style of music (every imaginable style) and suddenly recognized that the combination of their musical sensibilities, as witnessed on the 300 songs they’d penned together, created something new and interesting. Plus, the rambunctious, beat-driven nature of the songs offered Soren a chance to “freak out and go crazy” onstage while David showcased his impressive break-dancing moves.



 

“We were at a point musically where you could say we had given up, honestly,” David says. “It was at that point. We were doing it solely as a hobby. In the back of our minds we might have been holding onto the dream but it was more about the joy of music and having fun. We were trying to help each other out and we ended up experimenting. We came up with a couple of good songs.”



 

So the guys uttered their ubiquitous motto and haphazardly sent two songs— “Stress” and “Make Money” into the Danish National Radio P3’s cleverly-titled Karriere Kanonen (“Career Cannon”) competition in early 2009. And somehow, out of the 973 bands that entered, New Politics were one of 42 selected to perform. Except, they weren’t even really a band.



 

“They called and said ‘Congratulations, you’re going to playing in three weeks at this club, are you ready?’” David says. “And we had never played live. We had three songs. We had no drummer. We didn’t know if we wanted a bassist. We had no idea.”



 

David and Soren called Poul, another lifelong musician about to call it quits. In fact, the call came just a month after Poul had decided to give up music in favor of learning to be a professional bricklayer. But Poul too said “Fuck it” and the threesome rehearsed a few times, decided against adding a bassist, and played a raucous first show that left the judges both bewildered and amazed. The band, defying all possible odds, made it to the next round and in April were one of four bands to win the Karriere Kanonen, which unfortunately turned out not to be a real cannon.



 

The win landed them a slot playing Denmark’s Spot Festival in May, where the threesome played a show so wild Poul and Soren left the stage covered in blood and Poul nearly beheaded a fan with a thrown drumstick. Record labels in Denmark were into this sort of thing and began to flock around New Politics, fielding offers. But the band, like the pilgrims, had dreams of America, and a one-take video for the band’s impassioned rock song “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” which aptly conveys their fervor for performing (and David’s ability to do a headstand on an amp), convinced quickly American record labels to come knocking.



 

“We realized we were at a point where we either had to go with the wave in Denmark and Europe and get a deal over there that was the best we could get or we could come over here and take our chances,” David says. “We decided not to wait.”



 

New Politics, who signed with RCA in November, are not done blowing off convention and expectation. They are currently writing their debut album, most of which is demoed in a really professional looking makeshift recording space in Soren’s bedroom. The trick, as the band will tell you, is not to spend too much time worrying about the technical aspects of the music. Just play it with energy and passion, say “Fuck it” and everything else will take care of itself eventually.



 

“It’s not that much about technique or skill, but that’s over-shined by the truth in some way,” David says. “I think people are ready for that. People are fed up with what’s going on in the world. There’s no real answers. There’s nothing solid. There’s no foundation. We feel like that as well. That’s why we write the lyrics that we do. You can almost laugh at life. We’re like ‘Fuck it.’ We are aggressive in our approach and we’re going to throw it in peoples’ faces. We’re politics. I think our music allows people to let something out. It’s a wake-up call.”