Faith No More Have Secretly Been Working On A New Album This Whole Time

Despite previous indications that Faith No More were merely “considering” recording new material, bass player Billy Gould has now confirmed the band have been working on their first album in 18 years for “probably a year and a half”. The untitled album is currently slated for release in April of next year.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the bassist for the alt-metal icons reveals that the band are “pretty far into” their seventh album. The record will be a totally independent product, produced by Gould and recorded in the band’s Oakland rehearsal space. The long-awaited album will be released via the band’s own Reclamation Records and distributed through frontman Mike Patton‘s Ipecac Recordings.

The band are currently readying the album’s first single, Motherfucker, a song they premiered during their July Hyde Park performance in London. The track will be released as a seven-inch on 28th November for Record Store Day‘s Black Friday, limited to 5,000 copies, with a J.G. Thirlwell remix on the B-side.

“We’ve been working on this idea for probably a year and a half,” Gould tells Rolling Stone. “We live in different cities and all have other things going on, so it’s a matter of checking in and focusing and working little by little.” Gould says the band have only just become comfortable talking about the new album.

“People ask me all the time, ‘What are you doing now? You’re working all the time, but what the hell are you doing?’ And you can’t say anything. ‘Oh, you know, just working on stuff; working on some projects.’ Who wants to start hype with nothing behind it, you know?” the Soundwave-bound bassist explains.

According to Gould, the album reflects the directions the individual band members have taken since releasing their last record, 1997’s Album of the Year. “I think this kicks things up a notch. And I think there’s parts that are very powerful and there’s parts that have a lot of ‘space,'” Gould explains.

“Everything we do, with our chemistry, the way we play; it’s always going to sound like us. It’s just what we do, that makes us feel good,” he adds. When describing the sound of the new album, Gould emphasised the record’s “space and scope”, describing it as “big, big sound-stage space.”

Remarking on the band’s new independence, Gould says, “There’s just something really freeing about knowing that we can make our own decisions,” adding, “It’s really empowering to say, ‘Wow, it’s our clock; we’re doing it on our own time. There is no budget, there is no timeframe. It just has to be good.'”

Considering the band’s past proclivity for incorporating disparate influences into their work, Gould jokes that the seventh album will feature shades of Justin Bieber and use of a vocoder. However, one should never try and put anything past Faith No More. “A little word of advice,” says Gould, “don’t.”

Watch: Faith No More – Motherfucker at British Summer Time Festival 2014

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