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Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	(61/100)
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Source	Rating
Allmusic
Alternative Press
American Songwriter
The A.V. Club	B
Consequence of Sound
Drowned in Sound	(6/10)
musicOMH
Pitchfork Media	(3.5/10)
PopMatters
Slant Magazine
Spin	(7/10)
Under the Radar

The Sound of the Life of the Mind is the fourth studio album by Ben Folds Five, released on September 18, 2012. It is the group's first release since 1999's The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner.

The album debuted at No. 10 on Billboard 200, which is Ben Folds' first top ten album on the chart, selling 30,000 copies. It has sold 67,000 copies as of August 2015.

In 2011, Ben Folds Five reunited to record three tracks for Ben Folds' The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective. Bolstered by the experience, the band reconvened in Folds' Nashville studio and recorded the bulk of the album over a six-week period between January and February 2012. Following the main tracking session, the band met for a separate two-week session to record main vocals and a final one-week session for background vocals in the week prior to their Bonnaroo Music Festival appearance in June 2012. All but two of the songs on the album are written by Folds. Darren Jessee wrote the song "Sky High" and author Nick Hornby provided unused lyrics from his 2011 collaboration with Folds on the album's title track.

The band considered using producer Caleb Southern, who had produced their first three albums, but he was unavailable. In his place, they turned to producer Joe Pisapia, a multi-instrumentalist and former member of the band Guster.

Of the sessions together, Folds noted that they have enough material for at least two more records.

An unmastered version of the album's first single, "Do It Anyway", was released by Ben Folds on his official Facebook page on May 4, 2012, to kick off a grassroots effort to market and promote the album. Though Folds was signed to Sony Music Entertainment's Epic Records for his solo work and Jessee was signed to independent label Bar/None Records with his band Hotel Lights, the reformed Ben Folds Five was unsigned. With no label to distribute their new album, on May 7, 2012, the group launched an interactive pre-sale campaign for the press and release of the album on PledgeMusic. The crowdfunding campaign reached 200% in its first week.

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Wikipedia