OK Go [ tickets ] has set a Jan. 12 release date for its new album, "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky," and will pave the way with a series of club dates.

The tour, which focuses on the Midwest and currently includes nine dates, gets underway Nov. 5 in Millvale, PA. Details are below.

The upcoming 13-song album will be the OK Go's first full-length release since the Grammy Award-winning, treadmill-centric video "Here It Goes Again" launched the band into the mainstream consciousness.

In a statement, lead singer Damian Kulash said the new album springs from a different departure point than the band's previous releases. "It's not so much that we headed in a new direction," he said. "I think we've just expended the guitar-rock ideas from our teens and we're starting to get at more root-level influences." Kulash said the new songs were heavily influenced by Prince's "Purple Rain," an album he hasn't stopped listening to since he first got it at the age of 11.

In addition to being danceable, Kulash said "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky"--which was named after an 1876 book promoting the erroneous theory that blue light cures all ills--is contemplative and introspective with a vein of surrealism running through it. He said the album "embodies contradiction in a way I feel connected to. It's both the saddest and the most hopeful music we've made, and both the danciest and most thoughtful."

Apart from music, Kulash has been working on an assortment of activist endeavors, including testifying in support of Internet neutrality before a Congressional Special Task Force, according to a press release. OK Go also took time from their intense touring schedule (31 consecutive months, five continents) to raise money in support of New Orleans' music culture in the wake of Katrina. The band's efforts raised more than half of the money needed to build soul-legend Al "Carnival Time" Johnson's new home in New Orleans.