THE DARKNESS // Announce New Album + Drop Single

The OG riff cracking, line snorting UK retro-rockers The Darkness have announced the title and release date of their new album, dropping new single All The Pretty Girls as a teaser. Watch below:

Pinewood Smile is the title of their fifth album, due for release on 6th October via Cooking Vinyl Australia. It’s a follow-up to 2015’s successful Last of Our Kind. The album also welcomes new drummer Rufus Tiger Taylor, son of legendary Queen drummer Roger Taylor.

Rhetorically asked about the band’s relevance in a statement, frontman and riffmeister Justin Hawkins says, “Why should anybody care? Because if you don’t, we’re fucked!! History will remember us as the apathetic generation who negligently ushered in a dreadful dystopian age that may or may not come to be known as ‘The Rise of the Arseclowns’. We cannot allow this to continue! You may not give a shit about Brexit or Trump, but PLEASE … give a shit about The Darkness otherwise the last bastion of cultural sensibility will fall and our airwaves will be polluted by meaningless pop purveyed by arseholes and morons … Oh wait!”

Written in Putney, recorded in Cornwall and produced by Grammy Award-winning producer Adrian Bushby (Foo Fighters, Muse) we’re assured the album is brimming with multi-layered ELO style harmonies, tongue-in-cheek Sweet moments and self-indulgent licks that Slash would blush at. We hope.

If you need more Darkness in your life, the band is currently producing a new documentary due in 2018, showing “the full breadth of The Darkness’ legendary rise to the top, spectacular slide to the bottom and steady climb back up the greasy pole of rock ’n’ roll […] laid bare in glorious detail,” the statement says.

Pre-orders are available now, with All The Pretty Girls offered as an instant-grat download.

Pinewood Smile tracklist

1. All The Pretty Girls
2. Buccaneers Of Hispaniola
3. Solid Gold
4. Southern Trains
5. Why Don’t The Beautiful Cry?
6. Japanese Prisoner Of Love
7. Lay Down With Me, Barbara
8. I Wish I Was In Heaven
9. Happiness
10. Stampede Of Love