DJ Shadow performs at The Great Escacpe Festival, Brighton, UK, May 2011. Photo: Tabatha Fireman

This fall, crate-digging expert DJ Shadow unloads The Less You Know, the Better, just his fourth release in a fifteen-plus-year career. Shadow’s been rolling out a handful of material to get us ready — last week, he released I’m Excited, an EP with Afrikan Boy. He also dropped the official DJ Shadow mobile app featuring “Shadow Radio,” a channel that we imagine makes even the best satellite radio moments look weak.

Today new music came to our ears in the form of “Warning Call,” a fast-paced track that features British heart-tugger Tom Vek in a skit-skat of an arrangement that sounds like the Killers or Muse discovering computer technology more than any of the hard-hitting beat science that we associate with Shadow. Will this be a welcome addition to the Shadow catalog? Perhaps. But for Shadow’s fans it could be a tough watching their scratch hero dive into a more pop-rock vein. Just ask RJD2, whose 2007 pop-rock effort The Third Hand wasn’t received with open arms by his admirers. But maybe Shadow knows what he’s doing, and for now we’ll just assume “Warning Call” is just the name of a song, not an ominous prediction of his upcoming album’s non-beat aesthetic.

DJ Shadow “Warning Call” (featuring Tom Vek) by GrillMarketing