Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Not Breaking Up, Just Seeing Other People

When news broke last week of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman Alec Ounsworth going solo, questions of a breakup naturally surfaced, especially after the group announced in January that it was ditching studio plans. Ounsworth, however, has told Spinner that his own solo work does not signify the end for the band.

In addition to Ounsworth's upcoming solo album, Mo Beauty, the frontman is also working with a cast of fellow Philadelphia indie musicians for another side project, Flashy Python. The group emerged within the past couple years as Flashy Python and the Body Snatchers, and Ounsworth said that their album's release would actually precede his solo album. Meanwhile, two other members of the group, bassist Tyler Sargent and keyboardist Robbie Guertin, formed their own side project back in May, Uninhabitable Mansions.

This unstructured setup is characteristic of CYHSY, whose members have almost always had some sort of side work. Ounsworth pointed to this, saying that the idea of CYHSY as strictly a "band" was never actually the case. "The perception among the general public was a little bit different than it was for me, or for us; like that this was strictly a band and we're all together all the time," he says. "It was never like that."

Ounsworth isn't ruling out another studio album from CYHSY in the future, "but I don't really know if I have the stamina for that just now." The singer commented that the band's sudden success (which we totally predicted, by the way) turned them into touring machines, "and it was just by virtue of the fact that in the very beginning, we did what we thought we were expected to do."

In the meantime, diehard fans can count down the days until Oct. 20, when Ounsworth's Mo Beauty drops on Anti-.

Four to Watch: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

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