Early in 2016, Mark was at home in LA, working on some ideas for what might turn into his next album when he got an email from a friend, an English musician named Rob Marshall, thanking Mark for contributing to a new project he was putting together, Humanist. The pair first met in 2008, when Marshall’s former band Exit Calm supported Soulsavers, who Mark was singing with at the time. Now Rob was offering to write Mark some music to return the favour. “I was like, Hey man, I’m getting ready to make a record, if you’ve got anything?’” Mark recalls. “Three days later he sent me *10 things…!”

In the meantime, Mark had written ‘Blue Blue Sea’, a rippling mood piece that he thought might be a more fruitful direction for his new record. “It’s almost always how my records start,” he explains. “I let the first couple of songs tell me what the next couple should sound like, and it’s really the same process when I’m writing words. Whatever my first couple of lines are tell me what the next couple should be. I’ve always built things like that, sort of like making a sculpture I guess.” Eventually, Rob Marshall would co-write six of the songs on the new Mark Lanegan album. “I was very thankful to become reacquainted with him,” Mark deadpans.

• The 10-track LP features guest appearances from long-time collaborators Josh Homme, Greg Dulli and Duke Garwood.
• One of the most prolific men in music in recent times, Lanegan has released music with Queens Of The Stone Age, Moby, Duke Garwood, Christine Owman, Martina Topley-Bird and Maciej Work in the past year alone.
• Mark Lanegan has a solid fanbase thanks to his previous work as frontman for Screaming Trees and as co-vocalist of Queens Of The Stone Age.