Photo courtesy of Force Field PR

Toro Y Moi’s new album has a title and a release date. Carpark Records will deliver Anything In Return on Jan. 22. The brainchild of Columbia ex-pat Chaz Bundick, Toro’s current fusion of soul, funk and electronic music is far removed from the project’s chillwave breakthrough. The new album is Bundick’s first full-length release since 2011′s Underneath the Pine and his third proper LP. He talks about the album in the current issue of  Interview magazine, excerpted on the publication’s website:

“I was trying to make a pop record,” explains Chaz Bundick of Anything In Return, his forthcoming third album under the name Toro Y Moi. That’s not so shocking a confession from the 25-year-old musician-producer—except for the fact that Toro Y Moi helped pioneer yesteryear’s indier-than-thou chillwave movement. But Anything In Return, due out in January (Carpark), looks to be Toro Y Moi’s genre breakout—a slickly subversive masterstroke of pop art. Instead of obscuring ’80s-style synth lines under hazy psychedelic fuzz, it shamelessly transforms infectious melodies and plastic-fantastic beats via Bundick’s future-shocked, 21st-century lens, resulting in potential hits like the sci-fi R&B strut of “Cake.” “People will be like, ‘What is he doing?’ ” Bundick laughs. “I’m just trying to make sincere pop music that’s not all processed and bubblegum. Underground isn’t always relevant; I want to see what’s popular, then put my own spin on it.”

Toro Y Moi’s publicist also sent out a press release that elaborates further on the album’s direction:

The product of a move from South Carolina to Berkeley, CA and the subsequent extended separation from loved ones, Toro Y Moi’s third full-length, Anything in Return, puts Chaz Bundick right in the middle of the producer/songwriter dichotomy that his first two albums established. There’s a pervasive sense of peace with his tendency to dabble in both sides of the modern music-making spectrum, and he sounds comfortable engaging in intuitive pop production and putting forth the impression of unmediated id. The producer’s hand is prominent- not least in the sampled “yeah”s and “uh”s that give the album a hip-hop-indebted confidence- and many of the songs feature the 4/4 beats and deftly employed effects usually associated with house music. Tracks like “High Living” and “Day One” show a considerably Californian influence, their languid funk redolent of a West Coast temperament, and elsewhere- not least on lead single, “So Many Details”- the record plays with darker atmospheres than we’re used to hearing from Toro Y Moi. Sounding quite assured in what some may call this songwriter’s return to producer-hood, Anything in Return is Bundick uninhibited by issues of genre, an album that feels like the artist’s essence.