Motown-inspired neo-soul sweethearts, Fitz and the Tantrums have spent the last two years “pickin’ up the pieces” of international success and cult-status fame.

Now the Silverlake-based sextet have been picked up by Elektra Records, newly-headed by Jeff Castelaz, co-founder of the Dangerbird Records label from which Fitz and the Tantrums released their popular premier album 2010′s Pickin’ Up The Pieces.

Fitz and the Tantrum’s sophomore album More Than Just A Dream will boast the production skills of Tony Hoffer who has worked with people like Beck, M83, Depeche Mode, and Phoenix and is dubbed “an exhilarating slice of pop-soul” that reinvented their throwback sound into something that experiments more with the “organic and synthetic.”

Michael Fitzpatrick told Rolling Stone he had to suffer “many, many sleepless nights” to create the “dreamy,” sonically diverse album but in the end wanted to show fans that they’ve “grown a lot as a band and as people.”

“We wanted to show people that this band was more than a ‘retro band.’ We’d all gotten a little bit tired of that one moniker that kept getting applied to us,” elaborated Fitzpatrick. “That first record was that kind of hybrid, and on this record, we just wanted to push it even more forward and take even more chances, and it just required a lot of experimentation.”

Fitz and the Tantrum’s More Than Just A Dream is due out on May 7 via Elektra Records.

–Nadia Noir, KROQ Los Angeles