Dan + Shay have their fans to thank for making new music. The duo, made up of Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney, have been very open about the months they spent last year not speaking, unsure if their days of making music together were a thing of the past. Fortunately, both Smyers and Mooney realized they had a lot more they wanted to do, and it’s all thanks to the relationship they’ve built with their loyal fans.

“That was a tough couple of years for us,” Smyers admits on the Today Show. “We’d been a band for almost ten years at that point. You throw COVID in there, which was a crazy couple of years. And being in a duo is very difficult. It’s like a marriage. If you don’t go out of your way to work on it, and nurture that relationship, things can fall apart … It’s something that we realized we need to spend more time focusing on. After ten years, we were like, ‘We’ve got an amazing fanbase. We owe it to them to get ourselves right, personally, get our relationship right.'”

The night Smyers and Mooney reconnected turned out to be a very pivotal night for them, and what they say was the beginning of creating Bigger Houses, which they say might be the best album of their career. They also self-imposed some guidelines to make sure their relationship didn’t ever suffer again like it did in 2022.

“We sat down one night, hashed everything out, and we made a goal: moving forward, we want to spend a few days at least with each other,” Smyers shares. “If we’re not on the road, get back in the room, write songs. Hang out like we used to ten years ago, because that’s where the magic was. If you don’t go out of your way to do that, things can go by the wayside.”

Dan + Shay released “Save Me The Trouble” earlier this month, with the song debuting in the Top 30, and the fans singing it back to them during a recent performance on the Today Show. That might be an impressive feat for some acts, but for Dan + Shay, it’s what they’ve come to expect from their devoted fanbase.

“Our fans have always been amazing like that,” Mooney boasts. “I’ve always been blown away, every time, I’m always surprised. I shouldn’t be surprised at this point that they learn them so quickly. I remember the time we put out, it was actually ‘Speechless.’ Whenever ‘Speechless’ came out, it had been literally out for I think the night, and we played a show the next day, and everybody knew every single lyric.”

Perhaps ironically, “Save Me The Trouble,” which already seems poised to be one of the biggest songs of their career, almost didn’t make it onto their new album.

“‘Save Me The Trouble’ was the very last song that we wrote for this album,”  Smyers tells Audacy. “That’s kind of how it always goes; you turn in the whole album, you think you’re done. All the pressure’s off and you get back in the writing room, when nobody’s looking over your shoulder, expecting anything, and this song poured out of us. The same thing happened with ‘Speechless,’ on our self-titled album.”

Bigger Houses will be released on September 15. Find music and tour dates at DanandShay.com.