Photo by Wes Orshoski

My Morning Jacket fans were glad to see the surprise arrival of The Waterfall II on July 10, but since the release mined content from the original 2015 recording sessions for The Waterfall, it felt more like an archival sequel than a brand new album.

In a recent interview – however – frontman Jim James has revealed that there is a fresh My Morning Jacket release on the way, recorded after their well-received 2019 dates. (MMJ’s last official performance was Aug. 10, 2019.)

“So now that’s part of the puzzle that everybody’s trying to figure out. The new album is done, but whenever we release it, we want to play shows for it,” he said via the Kyle Meredith with…podcast. “Obviously, it’s like we want to make it a thing because it’s so exciting to have these new songs and want to play them live. We really recorded them really live. It was just the five of us, literally nobody else. Just the five of us and we played, and it was so exciting and fun.”

James also touched on the current state of America, noting that “Magic Bullet” on The Waterfall II was written about a real mass shooting, the specifics of which are lost in time: “What a sad fact when there are so many episodes of gun violence that you can’t even remember which one you wrote the song about.”

In discussing the death of Breonna Taylor – a tragedy that happened in his hometown of Louisville, Ky. – James laments, “The fact that more of our leaders, even from the police, aren’t demanding justice for this woman who was killed in her own home, this innocent person, it’s just baffling to me. I know it’s not simple. I know that restructuring the government and eradicating systemic racism and white supremacy, those aren’t overnight things. But I think people want to hear more passion from our leaders, more of a resolve saying, ‘We will figure this out. We will get justice.’”

Listen to the entire interview below: