(photo credit: Rachel Deebs)
In the past two years, rock/pop band The Fray has had a remarkable resurgence. Having been on hiatus after their frontman Isaac Slade left the band in 2022, the three remaining members—Joe King, Ben Wysocki and Dave Welsh—decided to become fully active again as The Fray. In 2024, they released the 6-song EP, The Fray Is Back, and in 2025 they embarked on a major concert tour, playing shows in the U.S, Canada, Europe and Australia.
Now in 2026, The Fray has just released their first new album in 12 years, called A Light That Waits. This is an excellent album that shows the band is in top creative form. It contains many songs that merge the band’s classic sound with a new modern edge. The album also demonstrates that Joe King is a strong, expressive singer who is fully capable of handling lead vocals for the band.
The new album starts off with the title track “A Light That Waits,” which is a high energy song that has a propulsive, electronic beat. It also has an uplifting, positive lyric message about never giving up hope. This song gets the album off to great start, that shows the band is exploring new sounds.
The album contains 11 songs, and it flows well from beginning to end. Other highlights include “My Heart’s A Crowded Room,” a passionate love song that has a big chorus, and “Ice Cold Lakes,” an uptempo track that is about looking forward and being resilient, with the lyric, “Still looking for the thrill of the chase.” Other key songs are “Still Got You,” “Emerald” and the heartfelt ballad, “Wherever You Reach For Me.”
For A Light That Waits, band members Joe King (lead singer & guitarist), Ben Wysocki (drummer) and Dave Welsh (lead guitarist) decided to write all the songs together. They wrote the songs during several sessions in 2025, and they were happy with the songs they created.
We are pleased to do a new Q&A interview with Joe King, Ben Wysocki and Dave Welsh of The Fray. But before we get started, here’s a brief history of the band.
The members of The Fray are from Denver, Colorado, where they met in the early 2000s. They released their first EP in 2002, and then they released their debut album, How to Save a Life, in 2005. Impressively, the album was certified multi-platinum and contained two Billboard Top 10 pop hits: “Over My Head (Cable Car)” and “How to Save a Life.” Then in 2008, the band released their second album, The Fray, which included their hits “You Found Me” and “Never Say Never.” The Fray subsequently released the albums Scars & Stories (in 2012) and Helios (2014).
Here’s the video of The Fray’s song, “A Light That Waits.”
In coordination with their new album release, The Fray will be launching a major new tour called The Summer Of Light Tour. During this spring and summer, the band will play shows in the U.S. and Canada, and then in October they’ll begin a European tour.
Here’s our interview with The Fray:
DK: Your new album is your first in over a decade. Can you talk about the band’s journey over the past few years, leading up to making this album?
Ben Wysocki: Yeah, it had been quite a journey, to go back to even 2015. We had started working on an album at the time, and the lineup was different. Our lives were different. I mean, that was 11 years ago. So much that has changed since then, and we didn’t end up finishing that record. A lot happened…COVID happened. We all went our separate ways for a good amount of time.
Then when the three of us we first started talking about coming back together to carry on, we knew music was at the center of what that meant for us. You know in all honesty, there was an option where we would never made new music again and just played the hits. But none of us really felt like that was our future. So we knew pretty quick that making new music was pivotal. We just didn’t quite know what that looked like or how. So we dove in and discovered a lot in the process about each other, about our sound. Some of what we discovered was that we still sound like The Fray. Some of what we discovered is that there was a lot of new energy there. But again, it was a big sense of journey and discovery. I think we started digging through and found some cool stuff.
Joe King: I think we lived up to the name of our band in those years. It was fighting, then maybe crying. Praying (laughs), then more fighting, a little more fighting, and then playing.
DK: In 2024, you released your EP, The Fray is Back, and last year you went on a big concert tour. So what has it been like for the three of you to come back strong as The Fray?
Dave Welsh: The anniversary tour last year was a big keystone moment for us, as far as on the one hand, celebrating and acknowledging what had happened a long time ago, and the fact that anybody wanted to still listen to that. But also, I think it did a lot for our own confidence in getting back on that stage and continuing forward. You know, if we would have put up a tour last year and nobody bought tickets, we probably wouldn’t be talking with you now about a new album (laughs). So I think it did help our confidence. It did many things—it established a line of communication with a lot of our fans. We had been wanting to get back, and the timing was a little serendipitous, to be able to go out and do the anniversary tour (25 years together) and reconnect and start up that conversation again, that we can now at this point hope to carry on, and for many more years.
Here’s the video of The Fray performing their song,
“My Heart’s A Crowded Room.”
DK: On your new album, you wrote all the songs together. How did you decide to co-write and collaborate for this project?
King: Yeah, we discovered new writing styles together and a new chemistry as a collaborative spirit. We would go into a room together, maybe with nothing necessarily at hand, that we wanted to write about. And then you just start listening to each other. You start playing and start being open to maybe something dropping. We did that through last year, a bunch of different times. And it seemed like every time we did that, by the end of the day, there was a song. And we were all looking at each other like, “Okay, wow, we have a song here.” So it was a fluid process, and very enjoyable.
We worked with this producer, Jason Suwito, and also with Ryan Linvill. And everytime we’d go into the room with them, especially with Jason, we would just be open and write and see what happens. Then the other extension of the album are songs that were written or they were there enough to build upon when we all joined up, and then we could put all the colors on the canvas together. So yeah, it didn’t feel long…it didn’t feel exhausting. Looking back on it, we were also touring all over the world last year. We played more shows last year than we have in 12 years. And we wrote the record last year and recorded it. So there was a lot of movement. But I think at the end of the day, it energized us. It just gave us life…it inspired us. We didn’t have a full map of what we were making, but it revealed itself in time.
DK: I looked on the credits for your album and it says that all songs were written together by the band. Do each of your contribute music and lyrics equally, or is there one member that focuses more on the lyrics?
Wysocki: Joe is definitely the lyricist between the three of us. You know, collaboration ebbs and flows and shows up in different ways. And even with each of these songs on the record, there are songs like “Ice Cold Lakes” or “Wherever You Reach For Me,” that were more or less complete from a writing standpoint, but didn’t necessarily have the fingerprint of the band yet. And that’s a more traditional process like that we’re used to, where a song would come to the band and then it goes through each of our filters and ends up sounding like a Fray song by the end of the day. Then there were other songs that represented a very new thing, like “My Heart’s A Crowded Room” or the title track “A Light That Waits” or “Emeralds.” They were a result of some musical moments that we discovered together.
Here’s the video of The Fray’s song, “Ice Cold Lakes.”
Then in the room, Joe was responding to melodically and lyrically, and I have specific memories of on “A Light That Waits” and “Emerald,” of watching Joe write the lyric and the melody in real time as Dave was tracking a guitar part. And it was all happening parallel, which was a neat thing. There was a lot firing and bouncing back and forth in the room, which made it a unique sum of the parts.
DK: One of my favorite songs on your album is “A Light That Waits,” which has great energy and emotion. Can you talk about writing this song?
King: The seed of that song came from the first time that the three of us wrote together for this album. We were in Ben’s studio in Denver and we were exploring this idea of something that is there that never leaves, but is a constant. You feel like it’s gone—like the sun goes on the other side of the world and you think it’s gone—but it’s really not gone…we’re just spinning around on a rock. But the song evolved as we were writing other songs and then it was another day in a room together and this idea, this seed came back into the orbit. We were like, “What is this thing? What does it want to be?” And then the lyrics started to drop, the melodies started to drop, and the music started to drop at the same time. Then it became clear—this lyric was informing us that it’s this light that is waiting for us. It’s this version of yourself that is there, that you can’t see yet. And even as a band, we couldn’t see this previously and now we can see it. But it was always there…it was within us, we just weren’t ready to see it yet. So this song became this guiding light for us in a way, and almost helped us understand ourselves and the record more and what we’re doing and who we are,. So we felt this message was like a beautiful throughline in where we’re at as a band and in the future.
DK: Another song I like is “Ice Cold Lakes,” which has a unique title and a very catchy chorus. How did you write this song?
King: The other part of the record was also in a collaborative spirit, which felt like all the writing for this record was fluid. It just worked. It wasn’t a struggle, and I was exploring writing with other writers too, just to feel that out and continue that part of me, where you just get in a room and be intentional about writing a song and inspire each other as writers. So that song came from the first time I wrote with Jason Suwito, and he had a couple of friends join us. The concept of it burst out of a place, this return to playfulness. This idea of maybe it was COVID, maybe it was post-pandemic…the world that we’re living in, the divisiveness. It gets so dark and serious, and you get sucked into that. It’s like there’s this weight that we carry because there are hard times, and times that we haven’t seen before and are confusing.
Here’s the video of The Fray’s song, “Wherever You
Reach For Me.”
At the same time, I realized I have to play more…I have to explore more. I have to allow myself to live and not be constantly carrying these things with me. So part of that is the nature of just jumping in a lake, for instance. Like going to live, going to experience this world that we live in that is beautiful. And being in nature is the most healing thing to me. So nature speaks to me and it was like…alright, this idea of a lake, this song that is about returning to giving yourself permission to live and to play and to be alive. That’s where some of the spirit of the song is captured in.
DK: On your new album, besides the songs we’ve discussed, what are your other favorite songs on the new record?
Wysocki: I really like the moment that ends the record, “Sea Level Drive.” To me, it feels like an important mosaic tile in the whole picture. Dave and I got that demo from Joe that was a pretty rough voice memo, and for me, it’s always a privilege to be the first audience to hear and experience a song. That one stuck out…it felt very honest, it felt very real. And as we got into the studio with it and tried to be all micro and professional and tried to produce it, it kept leading us back to its core essence, which is essentially what you hear in the record. We recorded a lot for that song that we ended up muting or deleting, and the message, but the spirit, the beauty of that song held true and we kind of had to answer to it. Yeah, that’s a moment for me that also feels reminiscent of some part of a creative process for every Fray record that has always been, that has shown up in every process throughout our history, when a song kind of demands something of you and that one definitely did that.
DK: Do you have any other favorite songs?
Welsh: I think one of my favorites, and one that I hope gets into the ears of a lot of people would be “Wherever You Reach For Me.” It’s right in the middle of the record. I’m proud of how we were able to thread the needle with that song, as far as keeping a positive-leaning concept and theme, while anchoring it with some fairly emotional sounding progressions and feel. And maybe that’s partly due to that it was another song that came essentially with the core pieces intact from Joe, and some writing that he did with some outside folks. So maybe it was one of those scenarios where rather than coming up with the whole thing right there in the room, we were all able to focus on how best to present that song that we all resonated with. Yeah, I think it sometimes feels like songs can either be under-seasoned or over-seasoned as far as being either too emotional or too positive. You miss that sort of yin-yang that’s needed. And I think that on the record, it really found a good groove in between those two.
Here’s the video of The Fray’s song, “Emerald.”
DK: I read that you’ll be launching a major new tour starting in May called The Summer Of Light Tour. Can you talk about the tour, and will you be playing many of your new songs in the show?
King: Yeah I think that releasing music is…writing is such a beautiful experience and one of my favorite parts of the process. Then when you capture it in the record version, you can see this thing…it takes form. And then the show is the total release of these lights, these little lives. And to me, all three are essential. And what we love is to do all three and especially that release, because it’s with people and you can experience it together. So yeah, how cool is it that we get to play our entire body of work this summer, with new songs, and with songs off our first, second, third and fourth records? We have more and more now to pull from. We are a band that’s been around for 20 plus years, but at the same time, this is just our fifth album (laughs). So we’re still getting started. But the fact that we can pull from all these records and create a show and experience from it, is exciting.
