Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts have finished their next album, a follow-up to 2025’s Talkin’ to the Trees, which includes three unreleased songs he wrote as a teenager in 1963. The recording sessions took place at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, California. Young shared details of the project in The Neil Young Archives.
Young entered the sessions with five new songs, recording four on the first day and the fifth on the second. Running out of material, he turned to his archives and discovered three unreleased tracks from 1963, when he was 17 and playing with his high school band, the Squires, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. “We were then out of songs,” Young wrote in The Neil Young Archives. “We needed more. The next morning I had a song going through my head and I was playing it. I checked it out in the archives and found it was from 1963, unreleased. There were more. I found three others with it … also unreleased! Three 60 year old songs and five brand new ones!” They completed mixing and mastering on April 1 under a full moon, resulting in a fully prepared record that Young eagerly awaits sharing with fans. “It was fast! We now have a complete mastered record, ready to go. I cannot wait for you to hear it and I hope it gives you what it gives me,” he added. The album was recorded using both analog and digital equipment, producing two distinct masters to highlight sound quality differences. Young emphasized analog’s superiority, calling it “as deep as life” compared to digital’s “highest quality counterfeit copy.” It remains unclear whether the 1963 songs are instrumentals, Squires tracks, or solo recordings, and the album’s title is undecided—possibly untitled or referencing “Second Song.” This project follows Young’s February cancellation of a planned Europe tour with the Chrome Hearts, though he expressed intentions to tour extensively in the future.
