Picture the most Phoenix place imaginable to record an album. Now make that place a little more Phoenix and you’re probably in the right ballpark. “As a teenager, I thought one day we’d be there,” Thomas Mars explains Matt Wilkinson of the Louvre Palace in Paris—where his band’s seventh album would be born. “They wanted to have an artist residency for the first time, so they built a studio for us and we’d work from 10 am to 7 pm every day.” The band was able to keep “bank hours” in such an extraordinary location thanks to the extraordinary times in which the album was harvested. “This was the pandemic,” Mars says. “So we could enter the building by one entrance and choose which floor to work on. It was so enjoyable but also sad. We knew it wouldn’t last forever, but with the pandemic we stayed about two years. I roller skated on the perfect marble one day.”