Guided By Voices announce their 18th album in 10 years, aptly titled Universe Room,  will drop on February 7, 2025 via GBV INC. The album follows their 40th album, Strut of Kings, which was released in June of 2024. Bandleader Robert Pollard and the longest running GBV lineup of members Doug Gillard, Kevin March, Mark Shue and Bobby Bare Jr, have recorded and incredible string of of 17 albums since 2017.

The unique audio palette certainly wasn’t unintentional on the parts of bandleader Robert Pollard and stalwart producer Travis Harrison. “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,” says Pollard. “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.”

The unprecedented approach to the expansive songwriting adds to the surprising new frontiers of aural sensations from Pollard and members Gillard, March, Shue and Bare Jr. “I wanted to get a little more sonic diversity for this album,” says Pollard, “So I asked each member of the band to record all the instruments for one song and I did three songs myself.”

March’s contribution, opener “Driving Time”, kicks off the record with the nighttime chirping of crickets before adding layers of guitar and percussion, creating a spectral and distinctive new atmosphere for GBV, which is echoed by Gillard’s spacey off-the-cuff guitar work in the outro of lead single “Fly Religion”. Guitarist Doug Gillard was recently featured in Guitar Player Magazine and picked in Rolling Stone’s 250 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time.

“For the rest of the songs, we used a lot of different approaches to the recording of both the instruments and the vocals,” adds Pollard, which is evident on tracks like “Clearly Aware”, where the band was completely recorded on just one mic.

Guided By Voices
Universe Room
TRACK LISTING

Driving Time
I Couldn’t See The Light
I Will Be A Monk
The Great Man
Clearly Aware
Dawn Believes
Play Shadows
Fly Religion
The Well Known Soldiers
Hers Purple
Independent Animal
19th Man To Fly An Airplane
Elfin Flower With Knees
Fran Cisco
Aluminum Stingray Girl
Aesop Dreamed of Lions
Everybody’s a Star

Pre-order Universe Room by Guided By Voices HERE