My Bloody Valentine will finally release their new album next month, to be followed by a further EP of new material next spring, Kevin Shields has told the NME. "We're halfway through mixing," Shields said.
Although MBV watchers have long heard stories about a new album being all but completed, this is the first time Shields himself has commented. "Based on the very, very few people who've heard stuff, some people think it's stranger than Loveless," he said. "I don't." He did, helpfully, describe the new songs as "differentish and sameish. It's warmer, and it's a more emotionally connecting record than anything we've done before."
Shields dismissed the pressure of following up one of alternative music's most revered albums, 1991's Loveless. "I'm expecting some trouble," he said, "but, you know what? I don't care about all of that. I know it's a record that's going to mean something to a significant amount of people who really liked us. The rest, I don't really care about."
The new album is based on recordings Shields began in 1996 and scrapped in 1997, which he described as "a quite conceptual thing because I purposefully didn't want to write songs in a linear fashion". He returned to them after discovering he "really liked the guitar sounds" while working on the remastering of the band's Creation-era back catalogue earlier this year.
There is however, no title and no artwork, and Shields managed to be perfectly contradictory when asked about the album's standout track, mentioning one "that's a real pop song, though the arrangement isn't very pop", and which has an instrumental ending – "with vocals from Bilinda [Butcher]".
Just to be sure, the Guardian asked one of the band's publicists whether what Shields had told the NME was actually true. The reply? "I believe so, yes."
