Kevin Shields has revealed a few details about how the new My Bloody Valentine LP will sound like someone “dropped some acid on” their last album, MBV.
In the wake of finally confirming a new My Bloody Valentine album is coming next year, Kevin Shields has offered up the first details of what it might sound like.
Speaking with Rolling Stone (following an interview with Pitchfork where he made the announcement), Shields explained that the album was originally intended to be an EP, but eventually grew to be more conceptual, and longer.
“In some respects, some of it is a bit straightforward,” he says. “The MBV album that we did in 2013 feels more meandery and not as concise. This one is like if somebody took that and dropped some acid on it or created a dimensional clash or something. It’s more all over the place.”
He also explained how the album fits into the My Bloody Valentine chronology: “[The band’s debut] Isn’t Anything? is a kind of metaphysical record, very sexual, dealing with things like madness. It was like a diary of when we were living in squats. And Loveless was more intimate.
And the MBV record was a bit like the end of something. It had a sense of nostalgia and yet it moved somewhere, and it had a sense of impendingness and looseness at the end. It’s about death and change and what’s happening in the world, as I perceived it in the late Nineties, and nostalgia is part of that. There’s an attraction toward niceness and warmth but the change is cold and a bit hard, and now the world is perfectly in sync. The record I am making now is not so much about death and change as freedom of the soul.”
Shields also went on to talk about struggling with his hearing, and how this is a major disruption to his creative process. And how his interest in analog recording and mastering will mean the new album will be the length of a standard LP, despite potentially being just six or seven tracks long.
Read the whole Rolling Stone interview here.
