The second single of Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s new solo album Hoodoo Telemetry, “Beautiful Bastard”, was released. Hoodoo Telemetry is scheduled to be released on October 3, 2025 via Artone/The Players Club Records, according to Blabbermouth. “Beautiful Bastard” can be streamed below.

Alongside Living Colour’s six albums and counting, Reid has taken on several roles since those breakout years, whether producing Grammy-nominated albums for Salif Keita, composing hit movie scores or lending his guitar skills to a fellow musical artist, including Janet Jackson, B.B. King, Tracy Chapman and Mariah Carey. With such work already taking up his schedule, Reid’s solo career has had to be on pause since his 2004 song, “Known Unknown”.

When speaking of what Hood Telemetry is, Reid says the album “is like a piece of my all-over-the-place mind. It took me a while to start this record because I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, managing my time with all my other projects. I was also in different spaces with these songs: some are new, others are reclamations of material from a long time ago. But suddenly, I found the focus and it was very clear to me: I gotta do this now.”

“These songs are looking at the past through a different lens, then looking forward,” he concludes. “Like, ‘Where is this going and how are we getting there? Are we driving the bus or are we passengers in this self-driving vehicle into the future?’ That’s the space that ‘Hoodoo Telemetry’ is really exploring…”

Photo Credit: Kalyn Over