Echo & The Bunnymen today revealed that the band’s upcoming 12th studio album — produced by Killing Joke bassist Youth — is nearing completion and will be formally announced soon, and that frontman Ian McCulloch “feels it’s the band’s best work for a very long time.”

When it came time for Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant to put together a new band “outside of the restrictive confines of Bunnymen-world” last year, he actually ended up tapping some Bunnymen for the job: namely former bassist Les Pattinson and current drummer Nick Kilroe.

With demos already in hand, the Echo & The Bunnymen braintrust — frontman Ian McCulloch and guitarist Will Sergeant — will begin recording their 12th studio album within the next six weeks with Killing Joke bassist Youth likely sitting in as producer, the band announced today.

After working on solo projects for the last couple years, Echo & The Bunnymen braintrust Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant will reconvene in the studio this summer to record the band’s 12th album, McCulloch tells The Quietus in a new interview, saying the record will be called The Garden of Meedin.'”

Echo & The Bunnymen spinoff Poltergeist — an instrumental trio that reunites guitarist Will Sergeant with former bassist and founding member Les Pattinson — today debuted one of the tracks off the band’s upcoming debut album Your Mind Is A Box (Let Us Fill It With Wonder). Check out “Cathedral” via the player here.

Echo & The Bunnymen spinoff Poltergeist — an instrumental trio that reunites guitarist Will Sergeant with former bassist and founding member Les Pattinson — today announced it will release a debut album titled ‘Your Mind Is A Box (Let Us Fill It With Wonder)’ in March then perform a series of U.K. dates later that month.

Before revving up his new band Poltergeist with former bandmate Les Pattinson, guitarist Will Sergeant of Echo & The Bunnymen recorded a fan-funded, acoustic instrumental solo album called ‘Things Inside’, which is now available for purchase — and can be sampled via the three tracks that are streaming here.

Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant has enlisted former bandmate and current Wild Swans bassist Les Pattinson to take part in a new instrumental band called Poltergeist that he says falls ‘somewhere between krautrock and prog rock,’ and which already is rehearing in Liverpool in advance of recording a four-track EP.

Next week, Liverpool’s The Wild Swans — the brainchild of former Teardrop Explodes keyboardist Paul Simpson — will release their first album in 21 years and only their third overall, a 13-track collection called ‘The Coldest Winter For a Hundred Years’ that features veterans of Echo & The Bunnymen, Spiritualized and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.