Today (January 27), Guided By Voices shared “Elfin Flower With Knees,” the final single ahead of the release of their highly anticipated 41st album Universe Room. Bandleader Robert Pollard and the longest-running lineup of members Doug Gillard, Kevin March, Mark Shue and Bobby Bare Jr., have recorded a stunning series of 18 albums since 2017. With a vast mix of energy levels and previously undiscovered combinations of sounds into 17 diverse tracks over a compact space of less than 40 minutes, the new record ventures into truly surprising territory, where barely any song segments are revisited, typical choruses are a thing of the past and fidelity daringly shifts between lo-fi and hi-fi. Listen to “Elfin Flower With Knees” below:

The song has daring guitar chords and electric bass lines, with Pollard’s raspy yet intoxicating voice crooning in the forefront. The unique audio palette certainly wasn’t unintentional on the parts of bandleader Pollard and trusted producer Travis Harrison. “I wanted to create, hopefully, an experience, kind of a wild ride, where the listener would want to hear it multiple times in order to grasp all the sections and fields of sound to discover something new with each listen,” says Pollard. “I trimmed down the songs so that there wasn’t a lot of repetition, so you get a lot of sections that happen only once or twice.”

The unprecedented approach to the expansive songwriting adds to the surprising new frontiers of aural sensations from Pollard and members Gillard, March, Shue and Bare Jr. “I wanted to get a little more sonic diversity for this album,” says Pollard, “so I asked each member of the band to record all the instruments for one song and I did three songs myself.”

“For the rest of the songs, we used a lot of different approaches to the recording of both the instruments and the vocals,” adds Pollard, which is evident on “Elfin Flower With Knees” sister track “Clearly Aware,” where the band was completely recorded on one microphone.

Universe Room breaks new ground for a band with a discography including tracks such as “Fictional Environment Dream” and “Cavemen Running Naked,” something many would deem impossible. Listen to the impossibility when it releases on February 7.