Robert Pollard’s Cub Scout Bowling Pins Announce New Album ‘Clang Clang Ho!’

Guided By Voices may have just dropped their best album in decades — Earth Man Blues — but Robert Pollard and Co. aren’t taking a break any time soon. Pollard’s side project Cub Scout Bowling Pins announced Tuesday, May 4th, that their LP, Clang Clang Ho!, will be released July 2nd via Guided By Voices Inc.

To herald the record’s arrival, the band is out with “Magic Taxi,” an XTC-meets-Byrds-esque pop song that sees Pollard entreating, “Take a ride in my magic taxi.” The LP follows the Cub Scout Bowling Pins‘ recent EP, Heaven Beats Iowa, which dropped in January.

GBV had a busy 2020, despite the pandemic. They dropped three albums: Surrender Your Poppy Field, Mirrored Aztec, and December’s Styles We Paid For. Their first full-length of 2021, Earth Man Blues, arrived Friday, April 30th. Featuring formerly unfinished and scrapped songs, that album was a rock opera of sorts.

“I tied the songs together loosely with characters and stage productions notes to make it seem almost autobiographical,” Pollard previously told Rolling Stone. “After listening to the final sequence, I thought it felt almost like a musical stage production so I added names and places. Actual scenarios and events that were real in my childhood. On the cover, it reads ‘A John. H. Morrison Presentation.’ John H. Morrison Elementary was the school I attended.”