Photo: Greg Watermann

When My Chemical Romance finally stopped touring behind their 2006 concept album The Black Parade, the band was so drained guitarist Frank Iero feared the worst: “I thought the band was going to break up.” But instead of splitting, MCR took a break, then hit a Los Angeles studio with Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen producer Brendan O’Brien and spent almost a full year crafting something far from the theatrical pomp of the Parade. As singer Gerard Way tells Rolling Stone in our new issue, he wanted to “harness everything that’s great about this band into shorter songs. Almost protopunk, like the Stooges or the MC5.”

The New Jersey quintet’s as-yet-untitled fourth disc is due in the spring, and RS hung out in the studio while Way cut some vocals for “Trans Am,” the track that stoked their new creative direction and pushed them to become “an American rock band instead of a British rock band,” as he puts it. The first-pumper begins with “I got a bulletproof heart” and includes a Queen-esque section where Way sings “These pigs are after me, after you” repeatedly. (more…)

To record the follow-up to 2007’s It Won’t Be Soon Before Long, Maroon 5 escaped the excesses of Los Angeles and decamped to the Switzerland studio of Robert “Mutt” Lange, who is producing band’s 2010 album. “It’s truly incredible, and it’s so different because we’ve had only work to focus on,” frontman Adam Levine tells Rolling Stone. (Click up top to watch our exclusive footage of the band recording and lounging).

Maroon 5 onstage and off: photos of Adam Levine and Co.

Rolling Stone checked in with Levine this summer, when he assured fans that while the album hadn’t “necessarily taken shape yet,” it would unmistakably sound like a Maroon 5 record. “It’s what it is,” Levine told RS. “It’s us, just newer, better, fitter, happier, stronger. It’s going to be good.” (more…)

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For their fifth album, pop-punk fivesome Good Charlotte are going back to their roots. “The only thing I can hear when I listen to this record is our first two albums,” says frontman Joel Madden. “It’s got that same energy.”

He attributes the vibe to the band’s recent hiatus ­after releasing Good Morning Revival in 2007, when the band took a year off from touring and recording. “For the first time since we started the band in 1996, we got to get away,” says Madden, who devoted the break to his family —­ girlfriend Nicole Richie and their two kids, Harlow, who’s almost two, and Sparrow, who was born last month. (Conversely, Joel’s twin, guitarist Benji Madden, spent the time off navigating his way through “a tornado path of relationships.”) (more…)

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For someone who once released a double CD, Billy Corgan has had it with the album. “I was never comfortable with the album format,” Corgan tells Rolling Stone. “It always felt so forced and was obviously an economic decision made by others and not an artistic decision made by creators. It can be draining to try to record 15 songs over a six-month period.”

Smashing Pumpkins celebrate 20 years of rock in New York: photos.

True to his word, the in-progress, psychedelic-leaning Smashing Pumpkins album, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, will be released one track at a time, as free downloads, starting in late October. “No strings attached, no e-mail address need be given, no fees, nothing, totally free,” he says. “A 44-song free-for-all!” Even when it will be available physically, the format will be 11 EPs with four tracks each. “I thought it would emphasize that each song is really important to me,” he says, “and also try to get myself up to the speed of a world that is absolutely devouring information.” (more…)

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Melissa Etheridge had a simple message when she met with producer John Shanks to discuss her next album. “I told him that I wanted to make a record that’s a hundred miles an hour all the time — unabashedly drawing from my all of my influences,” she says. “What we’ve done rocks harder than I’ve rocked in years. There’s a couple of ballads on it, but the majority of it is just really slamming.” The disc — Fearless Love — is due in March, with the debut single (also called “Fearless Love”) coming out in January.

Shanks, who has worked with everybody from Ashlee Simpson to Bon Jovi, began his career as Etheridge’s guitar player more than 20 years ago. “He likes to say I discovered him at [L.A. punk club] Madam Wong’s,” says Etheridge. “That’s where I first heard him play.” On Fearless Love, Etheridge says she is no longer trying to write pop hits for the radio. “I can’t play that game anymore,” she says. “You can’t win because if you sound like you are trying to write a pop song nobody likes you.” (more…)

Photo: Jennifer Rocholl

Rolling Stone hits the studio with Avril Lavigne, who’s hooking up musically with husband Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 on her next disc, for a progress report in our new issue. The big news: Lavigne isn’t looking to repeat the success of 2007’s smash single “Girlfriend,” nor is she looking to maintain her status as punk-pop’s snotty princess. On the as-yet-untitled November disc, Lavigne says she’s aiming for a more introspective sound with a stripped-down rock record driven by acoustic guitars.

“Life, that’s what this record is about,” Lavigne tells Rolling Stone. “It’s so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that’s really close to me, something I’ve been through, it’s a totally different thing.” Even though Lavigne is stepping away from the power-punk, she still packs the catchy hooks on songs like “Darlin’,” which was the second song Lavigne ever wrote as a 15-year-old living in Napanee, Ontario. Butch Walker also worked on Lavigne’s fourth LP. (more…)

Photo: Kravitz/FilmMagic

“Can we turn this up to 100 dBs?” Warren Haynes asks an engineer at a New York studio, where the eighth studio album by his band Gov’t Mule is being mastered. The technician complies, and “Frozen Fear” — a simmering, R&B-flavored track — erupts out the speakers.

The song is the result of what the guitarist calls “a very cathartic, creative month” this past January. After realizing how busy he would be in 2009 — thanks to a spring tour as part of the reunited Dead, followed by summer and fall shows with the Allman Brothers Band — Haynes booked time at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studio in Austin right after Christmas. “We thought, ‘It’s gonna be a busy year, let’s get started with the new record right away,’” he says.

What emerged were, in fact, two records. (more…)

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Although their still-untitled second album is being recorded in a gritty, super-urban part of Brooklyn, Vampire Weekend say the record has a sunny vibe befitting locales far different than the outer borough of New York. “These songs would be perfect for driving up the Pacific coast,” guitarist-keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij tells RS in our new issue, on stands now. Singer Ezra Koenig adds, “Or making an egg-white omelet. Basically, doing fresh things.”

Rolling Stone visited the band at Brooklyn’s Treefort Studios, where they’ve been nestled since January, just before they hit the booth to record some group clapping, which Koenig notes could really fit on any of the record’s crisp, bright songs. “We’re taking what we did on the first album to the next level,” Koenig says. As on their self-titled debut, Afropop influences (this time more developed) reappear and Batmanglij is once again in the producer’s chair. So what’s different this time around? The band says they’re able to concentrate on the music more. “When we wrote the first album, we all had jobs,” bassist Chris Baio says. “This time, we’re way more focused.” The result: lyrical reference to highbrow and lowbrow topics including a trip to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (more…)

Photo:KanyeUnivercity.com

Kanye West has recorded with hip-hop colleagues (Jay-Z, Nas, Common, Lil Wayne) and rock contemporaries (Maroon 5’s Adam Levine Coldplay’s Chris Martin) and shared the spotlight with the Police, John Mayer and even country sweetheart Taylor Swift. So, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when the Louis Vuitton Don updated his blog last week with a photo from the studio featuring 30 Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto and the Killers’ Brandon Flowers. In the post, West explained he was “working on this dope-ass song with Jared” when Flowers just stopped by the studio.

According to Leto, the image was taken earlier in the week, during a recording session with West in Hawaii, where the rapper is working “his ass off on a number of projects.” Leto says the pair were working on “Hurricane,” a track for 30 Seconds to Mars’ upcoming LP, which is being helmed by British post-punk producer Flood and should surface before the end of the year. 30STM has been working on the effort, which has been given the working title This Is War in a house in the Hollywood Hills for the last year.

“The fact that it’s slightly more than unexpected makes it really interesting to us,” Leto told Rolling Stone. “This record is like nothing we’ve done before. It’s like listening to a film. It’s very atmospheric. (more…)

Rolling Stone’s Steve Appleford recently stepped into a California studio with Slayer to watch the thrash-metal vets assemble their 10th studio album. The record — executive produced by Reign in Blood producer Rick Rubin, and produced by Greg Fidelman — is the band’s second with its reunited original lineup, and promises blinding speed and brutal rage. Check out our report straight from the studio, where the band tested out one of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott’s old guitars and mused on how their fanbase has changed over their 30-year career:

• Slayer in the Studio: Loud, Fast and Ready to Thrash

Photo: Kempoin/Getty

The members of Canadian power-pop crew the New Pornographers are keeping plenty busy these days. Singer-guitarist Carl “A.C.” Newman will release his second solo album, Get Guilty, on January 20th. And in March, singer Neko Case will put out her latest set of country-pop tunes. Titled Middle Cyclone, the disc features an all-star crew of guests including the Band’s Garth Hudson, M. Ward and many of her New Pornographers bandmates, in addition to her five-piece backing band. “Whenever I’d hear a musician was in town, I’d be like ‘Get ‘em down here!’ ” says Case.

Case also tells Rolling Stone that the New Pornographers are prepping their follow-up to last year’s Challengers. (more…)

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• Following their October 17th Obama benefit in Akron, Ohio, Devo are working on their first album of new material since 1990’s Smooth Noodle Maps. “We have about 17 songs we’re testing out,” says frontman Mark Mothersbaugh. “We’ve already been contacted by 20 producers — including Snoop Dogg and Fatboy Slim.”

• Denver piano-pop group the Fray have finished their follow-up to their 2005 breakthrough smash, How to Save a Life. The new album — called The Fray and due out February 3rd — was recorded in their hometown and in Northern California with Mike Flynn and Aaron Johnson, who co-produced their first album. (more…)

Photo: B. Hellier

Before Depeche Mode began recording their new album, the group’s guitarist and chief songwriter, Martin Gore, went out and bought a bunch of vintage gear. “It’s helped to shape the sound of the album,” says Gore. “The sounds we are making are more akin to stuff we did in the late 1980s, around Violator. That was a real creative high for us.” The group has been recording off and on for nine months in New York and in a studio near Gore’s Santa Barbara, California, home. On its last release, 2005’s Playing the Angel, singer Dave Gahan contributed songs for the first time in Depeche Mode’s 25-year career. So far, he’s given four new songs to this currently untitled set. “I think it’s natural,” says Gore — who was the group’s sole songwriter for most of its career. (more…)

Photo: Alicia J. Rose

Everyone’s going to call it a rock opera,” says the Decemberists‘ frontman, Colin Meloy. “I’ve just got to come around to that.” Meloy is in the midst of mixing the band’s fifth album, Hazards of Love, at an Oregon City studio. It’s very different from the Decemberists’ 2006 major-label debut, The Crane Wife: Producer Tucker Martine is piecing together 16 or so segments into a continuous, hour-long narrative suite that riffs on folk-song archetypes. It’s a twisty, fantastical story about a woman named Margaret who is ravaged by a shape-shifting animal; her lover, William, who is desperate for the two of them to be reunited; a forest queen; and a villainous rake. “There’s a story there, but it’s really painted with broad strokes,” says Meloy.

At first, Hazards of Love was going to be an actual musical, staged by director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening). (more…)

Photo: Lionel Deluy

Last year, 50 Cent went up against Kanye West, and lost. Both rappers released albums on September 11th, 2007, and while West’s sold 950,000 copies its first week, 50’s moved about 250,000 units less. Looking back, 50 says, “If I could change anything, I’d change the timing that I released it. But together we created the largest-selling week for hip-hop music.”

The two won’t be going head-to-head again: West’s 808s & Heartbreak is slated for November 25th, and 50’s Before I Self Destruct will be out early next year. Compared to 2007’s R&B-heavy Curtis — which featured Justin Timberlake, Mary J. Blige and Robin Thicke — 50’s fourth LP is more stripped-down, with fewer guest spots. “It’s darker,” he says. “It has the essence of [his debut] Get Rich or Die Tryin’. It’s authentic with harsh realities.” (more…)