Guided By Voices Preview New Album With the Single ‘I Will Be a Monk’

Two days before Guided By Voices release their new album Universe Room, the prolific indie-rock stalwarts have shared one last preview from the LP, “I Will Be a Monk.”

The 90-second salvo is prototypical GBV, with frontman Robert Pollard and company concisely dispensing lo-fi riffs over the track, one of 17 songs on Universe Room, out Feb. 7.

“I wanted to create, hopefully, an experience, kind of a wild ride, where the listener would want to hear it multiple times in order to grasp all the sections and fields of sound to discover something new with each listen,” Pollard previously told Rolling Stone. “I trimmed down the songs so that there wasn’t a lot of repetition, so you get a lot of sections that happen only once or twice.”

Guided By Voices previously shared “Fly Religion” from Universe Room, the current lineup’s eye-popping 18th album since 2017 and 41st album overall; in addition to Pollard, GBV features guitarist Doug Gillard, drummer Kevin March, bassist Mark Shue, and guitarist Bobby Bare Jr.

“I wanted to get a little more sonic diversity for this album,” Pollard added of the LP, the band’s first since 2024’s Strut of Kings. “So I asked each member of the band to record all the instruments for one song and I did three songs myself.”