While working on Guided by Voices‘ 44th studio album, Speculation and Gossip, frontman Robert Pollard developed an obsession with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “[I watched it] over and over,” he says. “I’ve almost learned the dialog like Rocky Horror Picture Show.” The record drops January 22 via the band’s Rockathon Records.
Pollard has also been immersed in surrealism and dada, fitting genres for a musician and visual artist who has a knack for bending words and images to his will — either via hallucinatory lyrics or collages that mesh realms both physical and meta.
The first single off of the new album, “Designed for Use,” is a barreling, muscled track that turns a piece of mundane packaging copy into a motto: Pollard was designed to be a musician, to play “in most stereophonic atmospheres.”
While the band’s last album, Crawlspace of the Pantheon, was recorded in the studio with the full band, GBV went back to the old ways for number 44. “We went back to doing things remotely with each individual coming up with his own approach to sound, fidelity and instrumentation instead of playing all together,” Pollard says. “I wanted more audible separation of the instruments and overall I was after more diversity in song structures, musical styles and lyrical content. I also wanted it to be much brighter, less heavy in overall tone than Crawlspace. On this one I just gave them genre references. Post punk, pop, prog, psych or combinations.”
Heading into 2027, Pollard caps off a year of artistic success — including his largest-ever show of his collages — and, in addition to Speculation, has a few other surprises on the horizon. “I work on collages everyday. It’s an addiction,” he says. “[There’s] special releases in the works for 2027 but I can’t divulge them yet.
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