It appears that the Pixies will be debuting some new songs when they play Lansdowne Road on August 24.

Asked this week about the possibility of a new album, Frank Black said: “I predict we’ll make a record sometime in the next year.”
This is the first time that anyone in the band has mentioned a follow-up to 1991’s Trompe Le Monde.

Meanwhile, Black has not one but two solo albums in the can – Honeycomb which is due on July 19 and co-stars such seasoned musos as Spooner Oldham, Steve Cropper and Billy Block, and an as-yet-untitled Nashville set that he’s looking to release in early 2006.

“I wasn’t really thinking in terms of, ‘This is the follow-up to Honeycomb’”, he tells US trade bible Billboard. It was sort of, ‘Let’s do another session and see what happens.’ Most of it was recorded in one night, like a midnight to 6pm the next-day all-nighter kind of thing.”

Session guests include The Band’s Levon Helm, Free/Bad Company’s Simon Kirke, Ian McLagan of The Small Faces and Rolling Stones tour band fame and hotshot singer-songwriter Reid Paley who co-authored five of the tunes.

“I hadn’t really done a lot of collaborating in my life,” Black reflects. “Reid showed up on the Pixies tour and we just holed up in the hotel room when I wasn’t gigging, and we worked all day.”