The Hold Steady ready new album

The Hold Steady are gearing up to record their brand new album, singer Craig Finn tells NME.COM.

Speaking after the band's show at Lupo's in Providence on Sunday night (October 21) as part of the US NME Rock 'N' Roll Riot Tour 2007, Finn revealed the band have much of their material ready to be recorded at the end of the year.

“We demoed like 14 songs before I got here,” he said. “We played one tonight, ‘Ask Her For Adderall’, and we’re going to start recording probably mid-way through December."

Finn added that the band will “probably” work with John Agnello, the producer of ‘Boys And Girls In America’.

“The ‘get to know you’ part of it is over with, like if he said ‘Craig, that vocal bit sucked’, I can be like 'then it probably sucked', it’s not like ‘he doesn’t KNOW me!’"

Although many of the arrangements are finished, Finn has yet to put lyrics to many of the new songs, some of which he says have a typical Hold Steady sound.

“It sounds like the rest of our stuff. It’s hard for me to tell what’s different. I haven’t finished lyrics at all. Writing a record to me is like doing a crossword puzzle, there’s that last one on the bottom and once you get that one the rest of them get really easy. I don’t have that one yet, but I have a lot of the other ones.”

The band will be previewing much of their new material on the NME Rock ‘N’ Roll Riot Tour 2007 too.

“Now that we have the arrangements done I can sit there with my iPod and make myself finish it up. We’re probably going to take like two or three [new] songs each week and play them during our set.”

--By our New York staff.
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