[Cover photo credit to Trevor Naud]

In November 2024, Guided By Voices announced the 18th GBV album in 10 years, titled Universe Room. Bandleader Robert Pollard and the longest running GBV lineup of members Doug Gillard, Kevin March, Mark Shue and Bobby Bare Jr, have recorded 17 albums since 2017, with Universe Room to be the band’s 41st full length album.

The new record ventures into “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.” The band have also shared “Dawn Believes,” the second single from the album due on February 7th, 2025.

Bandleader Robert Pollard says of the album:

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. 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. So I asked each member of the band to record all the instruments for one song and I did three songs myself. 

For the rest of the songs, we used a lot of different approaches to the recording of both the instruments and the vocals.