Bassist Tony Levin and Flatiron Recordings have announced a September 13th, 2024 release date for a new studio album titled Bringing It Down to the Bass. They’ve also revealed the title track as a preview.

The album will be available on double vinyl, CD, Blu-ray and digital streaming. The Blu-ray will feature Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD 7.1/5.1 mixes and hi-res stereo audio. The Apple Music stream will be available in Immersive Audio / Dolby Atmos. Thiago Lima at Iguana Studios in Toronto, Canada mixed the Atmos tracks.

Most of the songs on the new album are instrumental tracks, while a few feature vocals and spoken word. The sonic blend includes Prog, Jazz, Thrash, Classical, and a “whiff of barbershop quartet.”

While the album is called Bringing It Down to the Bass, it’s not all about that bass. Levin’s seventh solo album, and his first since 2007, is “an autobiography of sorts,” with the themes drawn from Levin’s musical life. It features a myriad of collaborators from his half-century-plus on the road and in the studio with Peter Gabriel, King Crimson and many, many others.

Levin shares about his timing and process on the album:

“It could have been done a long time ago, frankly, but it’s because of a problem I have, which is a very good problem to have. And that’s that I have a lot of touring and that’s what I love to do, playing live. It just didn’t give me much time at home to work on finishing the album that I’ve been working on for five or six years.

But, a year ago May, I looked at my schedule and saw a lot of touring with Peter Gabriel for almost a year and then in November, 2023, there was a Stick Men tour –and then in January a Levin Brothers tour – and I said to myself, ‘If I take March, April and May off from any live playing and maybe even any recording for other people and really focus on this, I can finally get this album out.’ It could have happened ten years before if I had the gumption to turn down tours.

I had pieces very much in the prog-rock vein and I had pieces that were based on the bass, and somewhere around the middle of the record I made the difficult decision to toss the prog stuff – well, not toss it exactly, save it for another album – and the more I focused, I chose the kind of pieces that had to me a sense of unity to it in that it’s about the bass. Not songs with singing about the bass, but each song is either based on a bass riff or a bass technique that I then invited some great rhythm sections to play on.

My basses do each sound different. I wanted to write at least one piece with the funk fingers and I did that fingernail way of playing that I featured on one piece, and hammer-on technique on that first piece, ‘Bringing It Down to the Bass.’ I used to use that a long time ago and I hadn’t used lately since I got the Stick, which is designed to play with the hammer-on technique. That’s also a piece that has a rocking, really hot rhythm section with Manu Katche, from Peter’s band on drums. Also, maybe two or three times in the piece it breaks down and stops to just the bass playing different riffs and then Dominic Miller, from Sting’s band, comes in and solos and Alex Foster solos on sax.”