Title: Unconfirmed
Label: Mute
Release date: September

Stephen Morris:
"I live in the studio. In the good old days, you had to spend money to go to the place with a mixing desk. They gave you sandwiches and stuff. Now you have to provide your own bloody crisps.
I get up at 6 o’clock. I come in and record some drums. I finish at 12. Then the guitar’s down from 12 ’til 6, then I’ll probably have a cup of tea and watch Emmerdale.
Bernard [Sumner]’s written some synth songs and Tom [Chapman] and Phil [Cunningham] have written some guitar songs. There’s one called “The Game”, but it might not be called that anymore. It started off as a folk song but then it turned into a jazz song. That’s the ones where you can see where they’re going. “Tutti Frutti” is a kind of Chic-y one, but that’s just a working title.
Why did we sign with Mute? Everybody felt like it would be good to go back with an indie label. We’ve known Daniel Miller for ages. He’s done all right. He never opened a club, which was probably a good idea."

TITLE: TBC
TRACKS: Singularity,
Plastic, Tutti Frutti,
Unlearn This Hatred,
Restless
DUE: Autumn, 2015

Back in early 2012, Bernard Sumner told Q that plans for the band’s 10th studio LP were progressing “one step at a time”. The group had recently re-formed, without founding bassist Peter Hook, after a very public falling-out, and were proceeding carefully. Close to three years later, the as-yet-untitled record is 75 per cent complete. “We’ve been touring a lot over the last three years,” Sumner explains today. “We wanted to see how the touring went. And it went very, very well indeed.”
Sessions began in earnest in the early months of 2014, before New Order set out on the road again, for a jaunt which covered both South and North America, where they aired two new tracks: Singularity, which rumbles along on a bassline reminiscent of Joy Division’s Shadowplay and Plastic, best described perhaps as an electronic banger. “That’s a good way of summing it up actually,” the frontman says with a laugh. “It’s old-school New Order electronic, like something off [1989’s] Technique maybe.”
The band worked with Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers on Singularity, along with two other tracks, Tutti Frutti (“A kind of slow-tempo disco groove,” says Sumner) and Unlearn This Hatred, which focuses lyrically on the relationship troubles of – as the singer has had to point out to his wife – an entirely fictitious couple.
When it comes to writing lyrics and melodies, Sumner prefers to work away from the band at his own studio, usually in the evenings, “with a computer and usually a bottle of wine and a lot of headscratching and a little bit of ball-scratching.”
The group have recently signed to Mute Records, though they’re unlikely to meet the label’s album deadline of the end of January. “I think the end of spring is more likely,” the singer admits.
If a release date for the record has yet to be decided, the singer tells Q that they’ve just had the first finished mix from Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Bryan Ferry) of the acoustic-and-synthstrings-based song Restless and the band are thrilled by it.
In the meantime, for those worried about how a New Order LP without Hooky will sound, Bernard Sumner has a message. “Stop your worrying,” he states, firmly. “It sounds absolutely fucking amazing.”