Panic At The Disco can’t wait to get out there: “Reading and Leeds is always a blast”

Fresh from completing work on a brand new album, Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie has returned to the UK for a flying visit to Reading and Leeds: he can’t wait to get back out there.

“Reading and Leeds is always a blast,” the frontman enthused, ahead of his appearance on the Main Stage at Reading later this afternoon. It’s no surprise, really, considering how much history the band have with the UK weekender. “I do, I do,” he laughs, thinking back to their first performance almost a decade ago now, where the band were infamously bottled.

“With the first time we played, thirty seconds into that first song, I got knocked out but that just made me so excited. It made me more determined to be like, ‘No, I’m not gonna cower away, we’re still gonna showcase what we came here to do.’ It just became more of a challenge to see how much further we could take it. Either way, it worked,” he concludes, “and it’s been eight or nine years now since, that’s crazy!”

As for what follows his performances this weekend, Urie’s got his sights set on the release of a fifth album. “I just finished recording it,” he confirms, of the follow-up to his 2013 effort ‘Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die!’, “and it’s being mastered right now, which is a process I don’t have anything to do with!

“That was kinda of a curveball,” Urie continues, opening up on his most recent single ‘Hallelujah, which doubled as the starting point of his new album. “It was a bit of a surprise for me too because when I did that song, the label were like, ‘Alright, we’re gonna put that on radio now’ and I was like, ‘Really? I don’t have an album yet…’ and they were like, ‘Okay, write an album.’ That was the catalyst that helped start the album.”