Kevin Bronson on March 3rd, 2020

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It’s been more than 12 years since the Airborne Toxic Event seduced crowds with “Sometime Around Midnight” and almost five since they fizzled with the dual 2015 releases “Dope Machines” and “Songs of God and Whiskey.” A lot has happened since.

The band went on a break. Frontman Mikel Jollett became a dad, emerged as an ardent political commentator on Twitter and wrote a memoir. Side projects came out of the woodwork. Violinist-keyboardist-singer Anna Bulbrook departed TATE’s ranks.

Today, the quartet — Jollett, Steven Chen, Daren Taylor and Adrian Rodriguez — announced that their new album, “Hollywood Park,” would be out May 8 via Rounder Records. That’s three days after the release of Jollett’s book, “Hollywood Park: A Memoir,” and, yes, the two are very much intertwined.

First, though, there is the new song “Come On Out,” the band’s first since the one-off single “America” in 2016. It’s an arena-sized anthem that, as the Airborne Toxic Event is wont to do, pushes all the right buttons. Singalongs will ensue when the band does its sold-out, four-night run at the El Rey Theatre beginning March 31.

Jollet’s memoir is already garnering positive reviews. It tells the story of being born into the notorious religious cult the Church of Synanon and his mother’s subsequent escape. “I mostly grew up in the wreckage of the cult where I was born, since we left when I was so young,” Jollett says. “It came to me like a puzzle I had to put together, almost like separate realities with different rules. So I wrote the songs on the record (and the book) from that perspective: that of a child trying to piece together the reality of the changing world around him; because that’s how I experienced it: like a mystery I couldn’t quite fathom that I had to piece together over a lifetime.”

The album ostensibly works as soundtrack to the book. It was produced and mixed by Grammy winner Mark Needham and written in the aftermath of the death of Jollett’s father.

||| Stream: “Come On Out”

||| Live: The Airborne Toxic Event’s shows March 31 and April 1, 2 and 4 at the El Rey Theatre are sold out. They will also headline the Greek Theatre on Oct. 9. Tickets on sale at 10 a.m. Friday.

||| Also: Jollett will be doing a book tour in conjunction with the release, including Friday, May 1, at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles.

||| Previously: “Dope Machines,” live at Coachella, live at the Mayan