INTERVIEW: The Band Perry Talks First Pop Album & The Journey To Get There

In early February, The Band Perry announced that they would be releasing their third studio album. And after two country albums, the sibling trio is changing up their musical direction and dropping their very first pop record My Bad Imagination, led by its first single "Stay in the Dark."

The band confirmed their pop album via social media writing, "We've made an album for you. Creating it has been the most exciting thing we've ever done. It's led us to disrupt everything that was comfortable and familiar to us a short year ago. If there's one thing we've learned in making it, it's this - being yourself matters. It matters even when not everyone agrees that you should be or understand why it's important that you are. The album is called My Bad Imagination. It's our very first pop album."

iHeartRadio recently caught up with the band during an exclusive interview, and they told us about their decision to move in this new direction, their forthcoming album, and new single. They tell us of the moment they announced My Bad Imagination, "An artist always braces for impact in a moment like that, but the overwhelming love and support that we received back was really, really special."

[Buy "Stay in the Dark" on iTunes]

The Journey from Country to Pop

My Bad Imagination may be The Band Perry's first pop album, but the trio has been gradually building towards this moment over the last few years. The group tells us, "Our fans have kind of gotten warmed up to the idea of the direction that we've started to move in. So it's been a long time coming that we've been having this conversation with each other. So, finally when the moment came to just define exactly what the next moment was gonna look like, I feel like all the jitters were pretty gone at that point."

With a new direction for The Band Perry, also comes a new way of creating music. They explained that what they did differently was put themselves in new songwriting environments and began to work with new people:

"The one thing that we did for My Bad Imagination, we basically put ourselves in brand new songwriting environments than we had ever been in before. Typically, in the records past, we would sit in our little writing circle with Reid on base, Neil on a guitar, myself [Kimberly] on a guitar or piano, and write. But this go around, we met producers and made some new friends out in Los Angeles, and we would be in a studio building the track while we were writing the lyrics and melody. It was just a brand new experience for us, and we had a blast. It really was the catalyst for making My Bad Imagination."

My Bad Imagination

Speaking of working with new producers and friends, The Band Perry told us that they worked with people like Jon Bellion, All Time Low, Benny Cassette, and Jeff Bhasker (Kanye West, Bruno Mars) -- who they say was a "dream come true" to work with.

My Bad Imagination can take on a lot of meanings. So, where did the album title come from? The band took it from a lyric in the last song on the album called "Get Me Now" that they felt related to the process of them moving towards a new musical direction. 

"In the last song that's going to be on the record called 'Get Me Now,' there's a lyric in there that talks about 'bad imagination,' and how sometimes you have to see it to believe it," the band tells us. "There were moments over the course of everything that we've just created where it felt like in some respects, some people in our sphere thought that we were being irresponsible for creatively reaching so far. And it was sort of the irony of us, going 'we think that Bad Imagination is exactly what's gonna lead us to the next moment in our career. So, we're owning that title. But it also just sets the bar for the whole next era for us to go, 'OK, everything that we have to do has to be as big and as imaginative as absolutely possible. So, it's double-edged sword."

The bridge to My Bad Imagination: "Stay In The Dark"

So far, the only glimpse of My Bad Imagination we've officially had has been its lead single "Stay In The Dark," and The Band Perry describes the song as a "bridge" from their first two albums, to their new pop album. "'Stay In The Dark' is, of the whole album, the bridge, sonically, from where we've been on our first two albums, to this third record. We get a lot more exploratory as you get into the project, the deeper cuts. But 'Stay In The Dark' felt like the first familiar hello."

RELATED: The Band Perry Sing Mad Libs