Guy Garvey says Robert Smith backs Elbow's 11th album
robert smith has already done one job for Elbow: he hand-picked the band for the 2026 Teenage Cancer Trust gigs. Now Guy Garvey says the Manchester group is writing its 11th album, and that the record is heading toward “sonically ambitious” territory.
The new album will follow 2024’s Audio Vertigo and the 2025 EP Audio Vertigo Echo elbow EP 5. Garvey gave the update at the 2026 Ivor Novellos on Thursday May 21, where he also laid out the longer arc around Elbow’s current run.
Garvey on Smith
Guy Garvey said Smith personally reached out to invite Elbow to the 2026 Teenage Cancer Trust gigs, after Roger Daltrey stepped down as curator. “If Robert Smith gives you a call, you better get there! He’s a wonderful man, and we’ve wanted to support the Teenage Cancer Trust for years, so it was a really great opportunity,” Garvey said.
He added: “Yeah, it’s him direct. He does everything! Even if you get sneaky tickets to a Cure gig, it’s his handwriting on the envelope.” That kind of hands-on control explains why the booking matters beyond a one-off charity slot: Smith is not just lending a name to the bill, he is shaping it himself.
Elbow’s 11th album
“We’re writing another album, which will be our 11th. We’re just about to get together and make that happen,” Garvey said. He called the new material “sonically ambitious,” though he also said it was too early to pin down the sound more precisely.
That puts Elbow in the middle of a productive stretch rather than a reset. The 2024 album and the 2025 EP gave the band recent releases to build on, and Garvey’s wording suggests the next record is already moving from idea to session.
Asleep In The Back at 25
Elbow’s debut album Asleep In The Back turned 25 this year, and Garvey said there will be something to mark the anniversary. He described it as “a much edgier record than I thought it was,” and added, “Looking back at it, you can feel the disgruntlement, which was part of life when we wrote it.”
That anniversary gives the band two active timelines at once: a new album being built and an old one being reassessed. Garvey also tied the wider picture to the state of live music, saying the small venues of a city are its soul and have to be looked after, after noting that 30 UK grassroots venues were lost forever between July 2024 and July 2025. Elbow and the Co-Op Live arena in Manchester had already teamed up more than a year before the interview to help donate sound equipment to those spaces, and the next record will arrive with that live-music pressure still in the background.
