The duo will kick off the run November 12 at Black Cat in Washington, D.C., and hit clubs and theatres across the U.S. and Canada through the end of November.

Highlights include stops at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia (November 15), Paradise Rock Club in Boston (November 19), Lee’s Palace in Toronto (November 21) and Chop Suey in Seattle (November 27).

VHS or Beta’s December dates include stops at Slim’s in San Francisco (December 1), The Casbah in San Diego (December 3), the Bluebird Theatre in Denver (December 6) and the Gargoyle at Washington University (December 8).

Comets, which was released in August, is VHS or Beta’s second full-length release and its first since 2004’s Night On Fire. The band recorded the album with producer Brandon Mason, who has helmed projects by artists ranging from Secret Machines to David Bowie.

Singer and guitarist Craig Pfunder said the band worked hard to write an album filled with great pop songs everyone could enjoy and the group could be proud of.

“It was a conscious decision to kind of put ourselves out there in a way that we weren’t ashamed of ourselves and what we were doing,” Pfunder told Pollstar. “It’s so easy now to get away with just putting out a record that is completely odd and weird. I went through a good portion of that when I was growing up – not that any of that music is bad.

“Let me rewind – I think what’s weird and odd is that bands aren’t writing melodies and catchy hooks like they used to. So much of the sense of melody has been lost in a way. We just wanted to get back to writing things that stuck in people’s head and that was memorable. If we achieved that, that’s exactly what we set out to do.”

VHS or Beta has come a long way since its first release, the 2002 EP Le Funk, which consisted of heavily disco-influenced, mostly instrumental tracks. Pfunder and the band have faith their fans have followed them through the changes.

“It is an awkward situation to be in – but you do change,” Pfunder said. “Hopefully the idea is that our fans will be able to change with us and understand that we’re always going to be a band that’s going to search for new sounds and new things within the music.

“I think if you listen to the records back to back, you can see and understand the evolution. You can also understand, hopefully, that when we made Funk, we were in our mid-twenties, when we made Night On Fire, we were in our late-twenties, and now we’re in our thirties.”

Pfunder said the new sound was born out of a number of changes the band went through.

“After our last tour, we went through a member change and we kind of had to consider a lot of things – how we were looking at music, what we were and where we were going with the music.

“That took us a while, because we wanted to make the right decisions. We didn’t want to force those decisions by forcing songs out. And we went through a couple of different processes of figuring out what would be the most honest and true way to write the next record.

“The guys put a lot of faith in me, and allowed me to write these songs away from the band. Pretty much all of our previous material had been written in a room with each other. So I have to give them a lot of credit. They exhibited a lot of faith by allowing the process to change.”