Early last year, Joe Jonas was in Savannah, Georgia, filming Devotion when he had a burst of another kind of creativity.
"I felt so inspired by what a beautiful city I was in and some of the music I heard when I was there," Jonas tells Rolling Stone.
He began writing new songs over Zoom with collaborators like Mikky Ekko, Mike Elizondo, Jason Evigan, and Ryan Tedder.
Eventually, he had written nearly an album, one he felt fit the wild nature of DNCE.
Jonas formed DNCE in 2015 with drummer Jack Lawless and guitarist JinJoo Lee while the Jonas Brothers were temporarily over. Both musicians had previously toured with the Brothers.
Jonas has started teasing the new music on TikTok, which many fans had correctly attributed to DNCE.
"Dancing Feet" will be the first single of their relaunch, with the video being filmed later this week. It collaborates with EDM superproducer Kygo, known for his tropi-pop remixes and original.
Kygo and Jonas have developed a friendship over the past few months, and when the DJ and producer played the song for the singer, it fits in perfectly with the material already written for the band's return.
"It's really happy. It's that feeling of not giving a fuck and enjoying life to the fullest," he says of the single.
"I think what DNCE always did so well was bring joy to people, which is what I wanted to do with this new batch of music. Obviously, it's still very tricky times, but it reminds us all of being able to go out there and dance and enjoy life."
While DNCE's funkiness will still be prevalent, Jonas adds a huge psychedelic influence to the upcoming songs, inspired by his favorite artists' Empire of the Sun and Tame Impala.
Jonas appreciates that all of these projects can co-exist simultaneously.
"In the past with the Jonas Brothers, I used to carry a lot of trauma when new projects would present themselves because you could only focus on one thing at a time," he explains.
The brothers promised themselves not to hold one another back from any personal endeavors, whether it's acting, music, or any other project one of them might want to explore.
