My Bloody Valentine Promise 'Loveless' Follow-Up This Year

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My Bloody Valentine plans to release the long-anticipated follow-up to its shoegaze masterpiece, 1991's Loveless, before the end of 2012.

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In an interview with NME, band leader Kevin Shields says that the new album will at last be released on his website this year. An EP of brand new material will follow and presumably be released in 2013.

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"I think with this record, people who like us will immediately connect with something," says Shields of the forthcoming album. "Based on the very, very few people who've heard stuff - some engineers, the band, and that's about it - some people think it's stranger than 'Loveless'. I don't. I feel like it really frees us up, and in the bigger picture it's 100 percent necessary."

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Loveless, the Irish collective's second album following 1988's Isn't Anything, has become a critically beloved rock classic and sold 293,000 copies in the U.S. since its 1991 release, according to Nielsen SoundScan. A follow-up album has been in the works for roughly two decades, which included a long period of inactivity before the band played its first live shows in fifteen years in 2008.

My Bloody Valentine will headline the Tokyo Rocks Festival in May 2013, where they have promised to play new material.

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