My Bloody Valentine To Release New Album This Year

Few records could claim to be as influential as My Bloody Valentine's 1991 classic Loveless. Crystallizing the style that would come to be called shoegaze with it's blurry, drugged out symphony of guitars, it received rave reviews upon release and has come to be considered a watershed moment in alternative rock. Small wonder that the band's mastermind, Kevin Shields, has been working on the follow-up to this masterstroke for a little over two decades now.

Fans of this iconic band won't have to wait much longer, however. In a recent interview with NME, Shields announced that the band will be releasing a new My Bloody Valentine album before the end of 2012, via his website. To say that crafting the followup to Loveless is a big ask would be an understatement, but Shields appears quietly confient in the new material:

"I think with this record, people who like us will immediately connect with something. Based on the very, very few people who've heard stuff – some engineers, the band, and that's about it – some people think it's stranger than Loveless. I don't. I feel like it really frees us up, and in the bigger picture it's 100 per cent necessary."

If this news wasn't enough to leave Loveless devotees in rapt anticipation, the full-length will be followed by an EP release, with new material to be premiered by the band when it appears at Japan's Tokyo Rocks festival later this year.

My Bloody Valentine will be touring Australia in February 2013, appearing at the ATP-curated I'll Be Your Mirror Festival in Melbourne and playing their own headline shows.