Glen Matlock has joined Blondie to work on the band’s upcoming album. The former Sex Pistols founding member and bassist recently stepped in for Blondie’s Leigh Foxx, who suffered a back injury, on the band’s April 2022 U.S. and UK tour.
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As Foxx recovers, Matlock has joined the band to record their follow-up to the 2017 release Pollinator.
“Glen has just been great,” said Blondie’s Chris Stein in a recent interview. “Unlike ‘Pollinator,’ we’re mostly keeping this album in-house. It’s just the band and Glen playing on it. He’s fitted right in.”
Though the band hasn’t revealed additional details of the new album, Pollinator, which followed the band’s 2014 album Ghosts Of Download, featured collaborations with Johnny Marr, TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek, Sia, Dev Hynes, and Charli XCX.
The band recently released Blondie: Against The Odds 1974-1982, the most comprehensive, and authorized, collection of the band’s material to date, featuring extensive liner notes and interviews with each band member (past and present), previously unseen photographs and stories behind each track and more.
Mastered by Michael Graves from original analog tapes that were cut to vinyl at Abbey Road Studios in London, the box set features 124 tracks—36 of which were previously unreleased—including a number of original demos, outtakes, and other recordings found in Stein’s old archives several years ago.
The collection features the recently released previously unheard singles from Against the Odds, including “Mr. Sightseer,” “I Love You Honey, Give Me a Beer“—pulled from an old demo that later became the band’s countrified Autoamerican track, “Go Through It”—and the band’s Doors cover “Moonlight Drive.”
“I am hopeful that this project will provide a glimpse into the ‘process’ and some of the journey that the songs took from idea to final form,” said Stein of Against the Odds. “Some of this stuff is like early sketches; the old tape machines are like primitive notebooks. The trickiest thing for me was always about getting the melodies out of my head into reality and the changes that would happen along the way.”
Photo: Shig Ikeda / Shore Fire Media
