Guided By Voices Are Starting Out 2025 in the ‘Universe Room’

Guided By Voices get lean and mean on their 18th album in 10 years, Universe Room, out Feb. 7 via the band’s label.

“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 Robert Pollard tells Rolling Stone of the album, which was produced by Travis Harrison. “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.”

“I wanted to get a little more sonic diversity for this album,” he adds. “So I asked each member of the band to record all the instruments for one song and I did three songs myself.” The chugging first single, “Fly Religion,” is out now — featuring the riff-heavy stylings of Doug Gillard, one of Rolling Stone‘s best guitarists of all time.
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The 17-track album follows this past summer’s Strut of Kings, as well as three new records in 2023: La La Land, Welshpool Frillies, and Nowhere to Go But Up. It will also drop the same day as a new album from Australian indie-pop band the Moles, via Pollard’s Splendid Research label.

“Richard Davies is one of the last great songwriters on planet Earth,” Pollard says of the album, Composition Book. “Every song on [the album] is up there with his finest and so it’s no small feat that after 35 years of making beautiful records, this one is his best.” The first single, the jangly “Chimes,” drops today.