San Francisco-based psych rock band Howlin Rain has spent the past two years working on its third studio album with noted producer Rick Rubin. The album is currently slated for release in 2011. In advance of Howlin Rain’s next album, the band will release a three-song EP, The Good Life, which will feature 20 minutes of new music.

The group’s frontman Ethan Miller explains:

After almost two years of pre-production work with producer Rick Rubin for our next album we found ourselves with an over abundance of material and an increasing gap of time between the forecast release of our next album and our last record “Magnificent Fiend”. On the eve of hitting the studio and beginning to record #3, Howlin Rain took a week to step into a studio and complete this mini album or EP. It was envisioned as both an introduction to the forthcoming full length due in 2011 (the songs are exclusive to this EP) and as a piece that cold stand on it’s own in HR’s catalog as a trilogy of songs that present their own unique journey and sonic arch. After such extended rehearsals and pre-production work we were interested in taking this opportunity to try and produce high quality recordings and performances off the cuff and against the clock that could capture a blend of immediacy and sonic intrigue. All three songs were tracked in one evening live in the same room at Lucky Cat Studios in San Francisco by Trans Am’s brilliant Phil Manley and taken back to Louder Studios to be overdubbed and mixed by Tim Green in a handful of days. From the time we set up at Lucky Cat to the time the EP was completely mastered and ready to go was a week and a half. In the midst of a journey to complete an album that will have been years in the making, the Good Life EP is a catharsis of immediacy for us blasted down from a long highway, a postcard from the outer regions where we’ve been navigating now for a lot of moons.

The digital version of the The Good Life EP, by American Recordings will be in gloriously sharp 1’s and 0’s, the details of our analog recording reproduced and represented in digital for your convenience, each kilobyte of information meticulously placed and crafted by a giant black computer, the only one or its kind, deep inside of the Columbia Records building in Beverly Hills.

The analog version of the EP, released by Birdman Records is a limited edition of 1000 vinyl package. It was printed by RTI on beautiful heavy black vinyl and comes in a silk screened sleeve designed by Bay Area psychedelic artists Alan Forbes and David D’Andrea and printed at Monolith Press in Emeryville.

The digital version of The Good Life is scheduled for release on November 30.The vinyl will follow at a later date.