LimeWire Music Blog

Spiritualized mastermind James Pierce works in mysterious, often mind-bogglingly complicated, ways. So it was anyone’s guess when we’d see a follow-up to last year’s fantastic Songs in A&E (which came a whopping five years after its predecessor) — that is, until now. In an interview with The Quietus, Pierce reveals that he’s planning a new album as early as next year. Of course, there’s still room for the songwriter’s notorious perfectionism to delay things. Asked if he could confirm when we’d be seeing the new material, he responded, simply, “Um…when it’s done. I can’t answer questions like that, when it’s done. But hopefully next year.”

Still, there’s more exciting news here for longtime Spiritualized fans. Pierce tells The Quietus that the new record was significantly influenced by the reissue of Spiritualized’s mind-expanding 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. Of course, this won’t be a straight rehash. “Not like it – not to go ‘Oh, let’s do that,’” said Pierce. “I’m not a big believer in backward steps, or thinking ‘Well, that worked then, let’s do it again’.” Instead, Pierce says the older record got to him while he was playing the album in full on tour. “[I]t’s very weird to lay out something you did 12 years ago in all its complexity and then get inside it enough to be able to play it live, and not have that get into some of the newer stuff we’re doing,” he explained. Pierce says that, for the new material, “Rather than just copying the sonics of that record and saying ‘How did we used to do it?’ or ‘We used to do it like this’, it’s raised the bar, and I think that’s good.”