In addition to their concert performances, Gomez's stateside plans include a Sept. 22 appearance on NBC-TV's "The Tonight Show," according to the band's publicist.

Released in May, "How We Operate" is the Gomez's fifth studio album. The set, which was produced by Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters), features the cut "See the World," the writing process for which vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Tom Gray recently addressed in a blog entry posted at the band's website.

"Sometimes a song is years in gestation," Gray wrote. "On our new album, 'How We Operate,' there's a song called 'See the World' that started on a summer's morning in 2000. I found a guitar line and that was it for about 2 years. A melody started to breeze in after that. One of my favourite songs is 'Ooh la la' by The Faces and I knew my song had some of its DNA. I threw some sha-la-la's in my nascent noodlings as a reference for how I wanted things to end up.

"I wrote that song for [vocalist/guitarist] Ben [Ottewell] to sing, so I took it to him before all the words were written: it can be much easier to sing your own words. I had a loose jumble of lyrical ideas, but Ben told me what he thought it was about, filled in some blanks, and a song got finished."

On Oct. 17, Virgin EMI Music Catalog Marketing will release "Five Men in a Hut (A's, B's & Rarities: 1998-2004)." The 36-track set captures the first seven years of the band's recorded history, including 16 UK B-sides that have never before been released in the US and two previously unreleased studio recordings.

A Gomez performance and interview segment will be featured in the upcoming episode of NPR's "World Cafe," which is scheduled to air Friday (9/8).