By Brenna Ehrlich
Guided by Voices super fans were stunned Monday when news broke that the long-running band had broken up. Their team, though, tells Rolling Stone the band is still going strong — so strong, in fact, that they have another album in the works. Thick Rich and Delicious drops on Halloween. No other details about the upcoming album were given.
Rumors started swirling after Bobby Bare Jr. appeared on the latest episode of Lou Barlow and his wife Adelle Barlow‘s RAW Impressions podcast. In it, Adelle mentioned she’s never seen GBV play before, to which Bare responded: “We’re breaking up. You never will [go to a show]. It’s over. We’re never playing again.” His comments understandably rang an alarm bell for fans, though some seemed to think he was only referring to playing live shows. According to Brooklyn Vegan, this was even Adelle’s interpretation of the exchange. “My understanding is that they didn’t have plans to play more live shows,” says Adelle. “But I think they are still recording! Not broken up. And yea, I had a lot of technical difficulties during the podcast episode.” Lou added, “they are working on a new LP but, yeah, no more live shows from what I understand.”
But there’s a reason the rumors gained some traction: Guided by Voices are no stranger to breakups — they’ve called it quits more than once (they broke up in 2004 and reformed in 2010 just to stop four years later and reunite in 2016), and the lineup has shifted several times since their inception. The current lineup — Robert Pollard, Bare, Kevin March, Doug Gillard, and Mark Shue — has been in effect since 2016, and they have dropped nearly 20 albums together. Rolling Stone even dubbed 2021’s Earth Man Blues the band’s best album since 1995’s Alien Lanes.
Guided By Voices released their last album, Universe Room, in February. The record featured tracks including “Fly Religion” and “I Will Be a Monk.”
“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,” frontman Pollard told Rolling Stone of the album before it came out. “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.”
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