The Cult guitarist recently gave 'Tone-Talk' an update on the band's first album in over half a decade, confirming that they are "well into the process" of making the new record. The follow-up to 2016's Hidden City has been tracked over at Rockfield Studios in Wales with producer Tom Dalgety, who has previously worked with Ghost and Royal Blood, among others.

Duffy said: "We've been digging away at that over the last year and a half. We're working with a great young English producer called Tom Dalgety. And, obviously, with the circumstances of the last year or so, it's been a little challenging. But we're making some progress. The philosophy in The Cult camp, really, is about quality, not quantity. We don't just need to keep putting out records for the sake of it. Without being ridiculous, we wanna, within a certain realistic time frame, make sure that the records that we put out are as good as they can be. So sometimes that takes a bit longer. And that's kind of where we're at."

About the songwriting approach, Duffy said: "One of the things about The Cult, I think, that may be worth mentioning is it's always been a collaborative creative effort between me and Ian [Astbury, vocals]. And as you can imagine, like any kind of situation, there's pushing and pulling, and Ian wants to go a certain direction, and I might resist, or I might wanna go a certain direction. And that tension creates [The Cult sound]. It's not like Ian writes 'Ian songs' and Billy writes 'Billy songs,' and we record them as The Cult. There are no 'Ian songs' or 'Billy songs' - there are Ian and Billy songs together. And over the time, there's a bit of a creative - it's not always tension; I don't mean that in a bad way. That's what makes it good. It's that blend. We sort of respect each other to the extent that I think there's a trust there, and I think that, after this many years together, and a few years apart, I think we trust each other and respect each other enough. I think it's healthy to have creative tension. There's nothing worse than walking into a room where nobody's got any ideas. I'd rather have an argument about something creative than to have nothing, just the sound of crickets: 'All right. What are we gonna do now?' We see things very differently. In a lot of ways, we're very alike. Our birthdays are one year and two days apart. So we're both Taureans. Our birthdays are both coming up very soon. We're very alike in a lot of ways and very different in a lot of ways."

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Band profile:	The Cult