Guided By Voices have shared new track entitled “Dawn Believes”, the song moves in a bit of a different direction for the Ohio band, with guitar & organ by Doug Gillard). The song also highlights a unique vocal performance by Robert Pollard, spotlighting his witty and uplifting lyrics. Says Pollard: “I wanted to get a little more sonic diversity for this album, so I asked each member of the band to record all the instruments for one song and I did three songs myself.” “Dawn Believes” is off the band’s forthcoming album Universe Room, available February 17th via GBV Inc/Rockathon Records.

Doug Gillard writes: “This song was assigned to me to record all the music for, and 3 others on this album went to the other members. I learned Bob’s basic chords from his demo, played 2 electric rhythms and added mellotron, piano, acoustics, more electrics while avoiding bass or drums. I endeavored to have the second half build a bit, and it was fun to do, as always. “Dawn Believes” are the first words on the back label of most bottles of the blue liquid dish soap.”

Universe Room, packing a vast mix of energy levels and previously undiscovered constellations of sounds into 17 tracks over a compact space of less than 40 minutes. The new record ventures into truly surprising territory, where barely any song segments are revisited, typical choruses are a thing of the past, and fidelity daringly shifts between lo-fi and hi-fi.

Universe Room 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 LP features longest running GBV lineup of members Doug Gillard, Kevin March, Mark Shue and Bobby 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 single “Fly Religion”.

“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.

In other band news, Doug Gillard was recently featured in Guitar Player Magazine and picked in Rolling Stone’s 250 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time.

Pre-order Universe Room HERE