Mumford & Sons
Mumford & Sons are ditching the acoustic instruments for a more electronic sound in their upcoming third album, Wilder Mind Andrew H. Walker/Getty

Mumford & Sons have banned audience members from bringing their phones to their recently announced pre-album gig at the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange on 27 April.

Ahead of the release of their third album, Wilder Mind, on 24 April the folk rock band revealed they will do a last-minute show in the coastal town exclusively to their mailing list subscribers but specified that whoever managed to get tickets would not be permitted to bring their mobile phones with them to watch the performance.

The email alert read: "As this show is happening pre-album release, the band have requested all mobile phone and recording devices to be prohibited inside the venue."

The quartet have released the entire track listing to Wilder Mind, while they played the album in full to a small show in London in March, but are keen to preserve the official release date of 4 May by stopping their music from going online or being pirated. The album's first single, Believe, was made available to purchase on 9 March.

Mumford & Sons believe their new album will offer a different kind of sound to what their fans have come to expect from their music and they even joked that they did not use a banjo on a single track.

"Towards the end of the Babel tour, we'd always play new songs during sound checks, and none of them featured the banjo, or a kick-drum," frontman Marcus Mumford told MTV News in March. "So when we took a break, we knew it wasn't going to involve acoustic instruments. The song-writing hasn't changed drastically; it was led more by a desire to not do the same thing again. It's as simple as that."

They're opting for a more electric sound this time round, something that appears to be a long time coming. "We'd been itching for a long time to do something different, and we picked the right time to do that," Mumford said to Billboard magazine at the end of March. "We felt that doing the same instrumentation again, just wasn't for us. We've got a broader taste in music than just that."

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