To the relief of many shoegaze aficionados, late last year, My Bloody Valentine leader Kevin Shields revealed that the band won’t be waiting another 22 years for their next release, unlike the gap between the band’s 1991 magnum opus Loveless and 2013’s m b v.
“We one hundred percent will,” Shields answered definitively, when asked if the group will put out new music in 2018. “We started recording it a year ago, and then we just kept on stopping because of this [project]. Basically, the record started off as an EP, and I realized it has to be, like, a mini-album, because it’s going to be at least 40 minutes long. So it’s going to be an album, but I don’t really know how many tracks it’s going to be. It’ll probably be seven or eight, by the looks of it.”
Now, only a few months later, Shields seems to have an even better idea of what the next My Bloody Valentine release will look like. Speaking in a new hourlong interview with NPR, he says that the band started recording a new album “over a year ago,” but that he’s going about it differently this time:
“I’m not making an album in the way I would normally make an album. […] It’s more like I’m making an EP, but I don’t want to be constrained by it having to be four songs or a certain length or anything. So it’s really an EP, but it’s a sprawling EP that I’m describing. I’m going to do a couple of them before I do an album.”
Here is Shields’ full quote about new MBV:
[We] started recording a new album over a year ago, and it was based on some ideas I had. We started to work only in Pro Tools to sort of see if these ideas actually work. And they kind of did.
So, then, we started to record analog last summer and we stopped again. We only really got backing track stuff done, drums and stuff. And then I’ve only really got into it, now, essentially because I’m not making an album in the way I would normally make an album, which is a self-contained thing. It’s more like I’m making an EP, but I don’t want to be constrained to four songs or a certain length or anything. It’s really an EP but it’s a sprawling EP. I’m going to do a couple of them before I do an album. I think we’re going to play live in the summer and we’re just going to start introducing new ideas. So I just want to mix it up a bit and get away from my ‘every 20 years and make an album and then tour and disappear for five years.’
Time is finite, so there’s only that much time available and I’m going to spend X amount of years doing stuff that’s technical and it just means that that’s what’s gone. And these next three or four years will be focused on just doing stuff. This EP thing — I’m focusing on that just to get it wrapped up before we start rehearsing in June — and then I’m going to make another one. I like that attitude. And then I’ll make an album. But, in the meantime, we’ll be playing live trying stuff out live. I just want to try and mix things up a bit and get into a more present state, which I’ve never really been in.
You can check out the entire interview with NPR over here.
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