Caught in a Snow 'storm'

Chasing Cars, played and replayed on the hit series Grey’s Anatomy as the show’s theme song, may be a tough act to follow. But that’s the least of top UK rock act Snow Patrol’s worries these days.

Now that it has come up with A Hundred Million Suns (MCA Music, Inc.), the band’s follow-up album to the wildly successful Eyes Open, the quintet hardly has time to think about public expectations.

In a phone interview, drummer Jonny Quinn says that he and his bandmates don’t feel any pressure about equaling or even surpassing their previous album. They just sing merrily along, doing what they feel is best for them and their music.

The spontaneity is very Snow Patrol. As Gary Lightbody, the band’s leader and main songwriter states, “There’s been very little master plan. We allow things to happen as much by accident as by deliberate intention.”

This nonchalance shows in how he looks at Eyes Open’s success No, he relates. The certified gold album did not affect the way they approached A Hundred Millions Suns. If anything, success has only made them stronger, more inspired.

“There’s no point in retracing our steps. That would have been safe. But we wanted an album that would be more challenging to us and the listener than anything we’ve done before,” explains Lightbody.

This optimism couldn’t be more apt for an album with a hundred million suns on the cover. The group stumbled on the design after they saw an inspiring origami while recording the songs. The image stuck, not only in the members’ minds, but on the glossy album cover.

The unique design is not the only reason Snow Patrol feels good about this new work. It’s also — and more importantly — the music.

It’s more in-your-face, more no-holds-barred. As Quinn told Mike Farley’s Bullz-Eye, “We’ve created more of the Snow Patrol sound than ever before. And without really being conscious about it, we’ve created our own sound on this album.”

This time, the group decided to gamble. It did away with the ballad style fans have grown to love in Chasing Cars. Instead, Snow Patrol resorted to percussion. The sound is different, but the effect is the same: Striking, soul-stirring. Carrier single Take Back the City is an example. Unlike most carrier singles, this one’s not about romantic love. It’s about another source of passion: Love for one’s roots. Lightbody wrote it as a tribute to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he grew up.

And speaking of cities, Snow Patrol went out of their way to show the contrast between the rural and the urban life. The group recorded half the album in rural Ireland, and the rest in busy, energetic Berlin.

It was, as Lightbody puts it, a complete change of pace. And a piece of work makes him proud as well.

“This is our most complete record so far,” he says. “A Hundred Million Suns sounds like the marriage of everything we learned from the Jeepster years and the Fiction years made into something new and bolder. Our spikeness and our indie-ness are coming through again with all the poppiness of the last two records. There’s a lot of melody here and you can’t cloak that whatever you do with it. This album is touched by our entire history, and hopefully sounds like our future too,” he says.

Now this we have to see, and hear.