The Lumineers - Cleopatra

180-gram slate colored vinyl with die-cut jacket design

Mastered for vinyl

Includes four extra tracks and MP3 full album download

Includes unlimited streaming of Cleopatra (Deluxe Edition) via the free Bandcamp app

It took four years for The Lumineers to follow up their platinum-plus, multi-Grammy-nominated, self-titled debut — which spent 46 weeks on the Billboard 200 and peaked at No. 2 — but Cleopatra is well worth the wait.

After exploding onto the scene with their monster single, "Ho Hey" (which spent a staggering 62 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 3) and its follow-up, "Stubborn Love" (recently featured on President Barack Obama's Spotify playlist), The Lumineers spent a solid three years touring six of the seven continents. During that time, The Lumineers — whose original members Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites founded the band in Ramsey, New Jersey back in 2002 — earned a pair of Grammy nominations (Best New Artist, Best Americana Album), contributed two songs to The Hunger Games franchise (including the hit Jennifer Lawrence/James Newton Howard collaboration, "The Hanging Tree") and sold an impressive 1.7 million albums in the U.S., and 3 million worldwide.

Cleopatra proves Schultz and Fraites — along with cellist/vocalist Neyla Pekarek — are neither taking their good fortune for granted, nor sitting back on their laurels. With the help of producer Simone Felice (The Felice Brothers, The Avett Brothers), the man Wesley calls "our shaman," the band ensconced themselves in Clubhouse, a recording studio high atop a hill in rural Rhinebeck, N.Y., not far from Woodstock.

Cleopatra is named after the title track, inspired by a woman from the Republic of Georgia, an acquaintance of Wesley's wife's best friend whom he met while visiting there. The hard-bitten woman drove a taxi with a can of beer between her legs and a cigarette dangling from her mouth, having survived a hard-scrabble life, pining for the man who got away after her father died. "There was this level of defiance about her," nodded Wesley. "She was accepting her fate, but still felt misunderstood."

"We took the same approach this time as we did with the first album, recording demos in a small house we rented in the original Denver neighborhood where we first moved," explains Wesley, contributing the lyrical ideas while collaborating on the music with Jer, who tackled a variety of instruments, including guitar, the very prominent piano and trademark tribal drums.

"Wes handles all the lyrics", says Jeremiah, "and Wes and I come up with all the rest together — music, melody, and structure. There are no rules or titles in our writing process, just merely chipping away slowly until we both agree we have something fantastic."

1. Sleep On The Floor

2. Ophelia

3. Cleopatra

4. Gun Song

5. Angela

6. In The Light

7. Gale Song

8. Long Way From Home

9. Sick In The Head

10. My Eyes

11. Patience

12. Where the Skies Are Blue

13. Everyone Requires A Plan

14. White Lie

15. Cleopatra (Acoustic Demo)

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