Neil Young and Crazy Horse announce upcoming album 'World Record', share new single 'Love Earth'

Neil Young has announced ‘World Record’, a new album the singer created with his band Crazy Horse.

The 10-song album will be released on November 18, and was produced by Rick Rubin at his Shangri-La studios in Malibu. The same studio was previously used by Young to record his 2016 album, ‘Peace Trail’. On ‘World Record’, Young provides vocals across the album’s tracklist alongside instrumentation from Crazy Horse, all of which was recorded live and mixed to analogue tape by Rubin.

Coinciding with the announcement, Young and Crazy Horse have today shared the first song from ‘World Record’, a tribute to mother nature titled ‘Love Earth’. The track sees Young muse on earth’s beauty, likening blue skies and crystal waters to a fanciful romance. “We lived by the sun and had it all”, Young sings, “We were living in a dream”. Listen to that below:

‘World Record’ comes after a recent album tease from Young during an episode of Rubin’s ‘Broken Record’ podcast. During his conversation with the producer, Young promised that ‘World Record’ would feature “unheard of combinations of instruments,” and also discussed the songwriting process involved in making the album.

‘World Record’ will arrive the same year as ‘Toast’, the most recent album from Young and Crazy Horse released in July. That project — which was previewed by the single ‘Timberline’ — was originally written in 2001, but was later shelved due to it being “so sad at the time that I couldn’t put it out,” Young said.

Prior to that, the band last year released ‘Barn’, which marked Young’s 14th joint album with Crazy Horse at the time. The record featured the single ‘Heading West’, and was the basis of a making-of documentary directed by the Daryl Hannah. In a four-star review of ‘Barn’, NME said the album proves “that Neil Young remains as vital as he always has been.”

Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s ‘World Record’ tracklist is: 

1. ‘Love Earth’
2. ‘Overhead’
3. ‘I Walk With You (earth ringtone)’
4. ‘This Old Planet (changing days)’
5. ‘The World (is in trouble now)’
6. ‘Break The Chain’
7. ‘The Long Day Before’
8. ‘Walkin’ On The Road (to the future)’
9. ‘The Wonder Won’t Wait’
10. ‘Chevrolet’
11. ‘This Old Planet reprise’