The Who - Who

The Who’s twelfth studio album, WHO will be released on 22 November 2019.

1. All This Music Must Fade
2. Ball and Chain
3. I Don’t Wanna Get Wise
4. Detour
5. Beads On One String
6. Hero Ground Zero
7. Street Song
8. I’ll Be Back
9. Break The News
10. Rockin’ In Rage
11. She Rocked My World

The eleven-track album was mostly recorded in London and Los Angeles during spring and summer 2019 and was co-produced by Pete Townshend and Dave Sardy with vocal production by Dave Eringa.

Singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend are joined on the album by long-time Who drummer Zak Starkey, bassist Pino Palladino along with contributions from Simon Townshend, Benmont Tench, Carla Azar, Joey Waronker and Gordon Giltrap.

The album cover has been created by Pop artist, Sir Peter Blake who first met the band in 1964 at a taping of the legendary TV show Ready Steady Go! Peter Blake designed the cover and contributed a painting to the sleeve of The Who’s 1981 album Face Dances.

The songs on WHO cover a myriad of subjects including the Grenfell Tower fire, musical theft, spirituality, reincarnation, the power of memory and ‘an old rock star that has lost his marbles’. Singer Roger Daltrey rates it amongst their strongest “I think we’ve made our best album since Quadrophenia in 1973, Pete hasn’t lost it, he’s still a fabulous songwriter, and he’s still got that cutting edge”.

Pete Townshend “This album is almost all new songs written last year, with just two exceptions. There is no theme, no concept, no story, just a set of songs that I (and my brother Simon) wrote to give Roger Daltrey some inspiration, challenges and scope for his newly revived singing voice. Roger and I are both old men now, by any measure, so I’ve tried to stay away from romance, but also from nostalgia if I can. I didn’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Memories are OK, and some of the songs refer to the explosive state of things today. I made new home studio demos of all these songs in the summer of 2018 using a wide collection of instruments old and new.”