Matt Johnson’s The The set to release ‘Tony’ film soundtrack album in January

The enigmatic Matt Johnson appears to be on the verge of releasing the first new The The album in a decade: a score to the forthcoming serial-killer flick “Tony,” which the band’s website this week announced will be out in January.

Of course, Johnson — presumably living large off of his M&M’s fortune — has a Neil Young-like track record of shelving finished albums, from 1982’s The Pornography of Despair and 1997’s Gun Sluts to the 2002 film-music compilation Silent Tongue and The End of the Day, a brand-new project announced in 2007 that’s still never surfaced.

The The’s website first mentioned the “Tony” soundtrack in 2006 in a post entitled “In the Studio,” which revealed Johnson was working on music for a number of film projects:

“The The have been busy in the studio composing various soundtracks, including ‘Rock Box Hammer,’ the provisionally entitled feature-length documentary from Nichola Bruce, as well as ‘Tony,’ the new film by Gerard Johnson, and ‘Track,’ the new feature length documentary from Johanna St Michaels. These scores will be available on The The’s forthcoming Cineola Volume 1 soundtrack album to be released through Lazarus.”

This past June, The The’s site featured another post about “Tony” in advance of the film’s premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. At that time, the site revealed, “The soundtrack to ‘Tony’ is the first in a series of soundtracks by The The due to be released by CineOla at a later date.” Now the band’s site says the The The soundtrack “on the CineOla label (will be) available from www.thethe.com January 2010.”

The film itself, which opens in the U.K. in January as well, is described in this review as portraying “a week in the life of a lonely psycho-killer with severe social problems and an unfashionable mustache. ‘Tony’ is a darkly comic take on the horror/killer genre.” The film’s trailer is posted below, and The The’s site has a photo montage set to what presumably is some of Johnson’s score for the film.

Should the “Tony” soundtrack see the light of day, it’ll be the first The The album since 2000’s NakedSelf, and the band’s first new music since Johnson released a download-only single entitled “Mrs. Mac” in 2007. That song was supposedly the first taste of The End of the Day, a CD/DVD/book  featuring “films, photographs, instrumental soundscapes, songs and guest appearances from Elysian Fields, JG Thirlwell, Thomas Leer, Rob Ellis, Tim Pope, Anna Domino and many others.”

See the “Tony” trailer after the jump…