Kevin Shields has said that My Bloody Valentine’s long-awaited follow-up to Loveless will be released by the end of the year, report the NME.
He told the magazine in an interview that it would be out first via his website, and will be followed by a further EP of new material in the new year.
Shields said: "I think with this record, people who like us will immediately connect with something. Based on the very, very few people who’ve heard stuff – some engineers, the band, and that’s about it – some people think it’s stranger than Loveless. I don’t. I feel like it really frees us up, and in the bigger picture it’s 100 per cent necessary."
He also confirmed that the band would be playing a slot at the Tokyo Rocks festival in Japan, as yet their sole live appearance next year.
Whether or not the fates will conspire, the stars will align, and the new album will be out by 2013, bringing with it a crushing endgame to the ‘-gaze’ epidemic, remains to be seen. Either way, in our interview with Mr Shields earlier this year, he gave us a taster of what to expect sound-wise: "There’s one drum & bass song, from that era when we were doing drum & bass music, which never came out. We were actually inventing a new sound – and this song doesn’t really represent it, but – we were doing slowed down drum & bass music around 1993, 1994. But it just came to nothing, mainly because we didn’t know how to do it. We didn’t realise that you use just a few good samples, then it’s about how you stretch them on the computer. We were trying to program it, work out every beat. We got some really good things, but the lesson we learnt was that without the element of spontaneity, without the element of chance we used to get from live playing, it doesn’t work for us. Just making music on the computer isn’t really what I’m into. But there’s one song that survived from that period, that approach. Like slowed down drum & bass. Except, um… it’s really fast."
Have a read of the full interview here.
