Kevin Bronson on June 2nd, 2016

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Beck has now fully exited his “Morning Phase.” Today, a day after teasing new music on Instagram, the 45-year-old auteur released the new single “Wow,” a neon rapper replete with tooting synths and bouncing beats. It’s a song, said today’s press release, that Beck had been demoing at home and “had ‘gone viral’ amongst his children and their friends, that playdates were morphing into dance parties punctuated by refrains of ‘WOW.’”

With the single, Beck’s first new music since last summer’s psych-pop jam “Dreams,” came the news that he will release a new album Oct. 21 via Capitol Records. In an interview with DJ Zane Lowe, Beck explained that the album — made with producer Greg Kurstin — was actually started prior to 2014’s “Morning Phase,” which won a Grammy, but that he and Kurstin let the songs percolate so they would find their own identity. “It would have been easy to make something that sounds like ‘Odelay’ or ‘Midnite Vultures,’” he said, “but we wanted to find something specific.” He added, “I think this era has informed this record.”

||| Stream: “Wow”