Iggy and the Stooges, one of the very first pre-punk bands whose ferocious energy has created some of the genre’s most landmark records of all-time and led by the master of disaster Iggy Pop, has just finished recording an album of all new material, the long-awaited follow-up to their 2007 album The Weirdness.

The forthcoming new release is entitled Ready To Die, and is reportedly described by the album’s engineer Ed Cherney as sounding and having the attitude of the “old-time Stooges” and that ultimately the album is “raw, with great songs, not necessarily big choruses,” gushing that on Ready To Die, the band has produced “the anti-Christ of anthems.”

Hailing from Detroit, The Stooges quickly adapted a snarling, bear jaws kind of approach to their music, which is lean rock and roll injected with rocket fuel, which created some of the most terrifying and urgent music of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Having Iggy Pop as the front man, with his wild whirling dervish on-stage and off-stage antics, quickly found him an image which is like a cross between Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison, and a musical version of Charles Bukowski. The band made an art out of creating more out of less; most of their music at first listen sounds like an ABC chart of how to create punk, with dime store lyrics and simple power riffs. Broken down, however, it was those elements which created the strength and lion-out-of-control sound and style of The Stooges, and became their sonic dirty diamond in the rough, influencing scores upon scores of bands who followed. Arguably, they were almost singlehandedly responsible for the attitude and sound of the New York City punk movement, which spawned bands like The Ramones, Television, and Cleveland’s Dead Boys, among many other lesser light ensembles.

Ready To Die still has yet to find a definitive release date, or even a tracklisting, but the song titles already released to the press are the wonderfully titled “I Got A Job, But It Don’t Pay Shit” and “Gun.” Even though the band members are creeping into their seventies (and without their original guitarist Ron Asheton, who died in 2009 and was replaced by James Williamson, who joined the band originally in 1973), unlike The Rolling Stones, there isn’t an ounce of pretention or eye-rolling at the group for carrying on these sounds at their age. In fact, Iggy and The Stooges seems to command high order respect still, to this very day. After all, someone still has to hold the baton high for this kind of music, even if it’s the band that pretty much invented it.

[Source: Exclaim]