Billy Gibbons said plans are being made to join Rick Rubin in the studio for a new ZZ Top album in the coming months. The band’s last LP, La Futura, was also produced by Rubin and released in 2012, nine years after their 14th record, Mescalero.

“It’s called Foam Box Recordings, where we get to gather and try out a few new things,” Gibbons told the Express of their work in progress. “In fact, I was just on the phone just yesterday with the noted producer Mr. Rick Rubin. Rick’s got a few ideas that he threw into the mix. He’s raring to get us back in the room.”

Gibbons noted that Rubin "likes to work on the West Coast, so it’s between Texas and California where we dream this stuff up. So it’ll be coming up, probably in the next few months, I hope. It’s a bit premature for a proper announcement, but it’ll be forthcoming.”

In 2018, Gibbons said he had “great confidence” in the music his bandmates Dusty Hill and Frank Beard have been writing while he worked on his solo album The Big Bad Blues. “They said, ‘Yeah, go do your thing,’” he recalled. “‘We’re going to start peeling the onion and create a few ZZ Top starter pieces.’”

The singer and guitarist previously said the band had enough material left over from La Futura to release a second volume, which he hoped might happen someday. “The label didn’t really want to release a dual disc in this rather topsy-turvy musical landscape, where promoting new material is so challenging," Gibbons explained. "So we’re sitting on 10 more songs. … We have that big ball of wax waiting to roll."

 

See ZZ Top in the Top 25 Southern Rock Albums

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