(Credits: Alamy)
Wed 28 January 2026 4:00, UK
Poor Blondie have been through the mill a bit over the course of recent years, haven’t they?
Between a tumultuous tour in 2020 and 2021, which was partly postponed due to Covid, during which half the band couldn’t actually end up performing due to health issues, a Glastonbury legends slot in 2023, where Debbie Harry only hit some of the notes, and the sad passing of drummer Clem Burke last year, it hasn’t half been a slog.
In this sense, and particularly in relation to Burke’s untimely death, the thought of new music has somewhat been put on the back burner for a while now. Harry and Chris Stein were seen touting the prospect of a fresh album early last year, but when their drumming soulmate drew his last breaths merely a few months later, it sent everything spinning.
The band announced in August that this speculative record, ruminating in the pipeline for such a long time now, would be titled High Noon, but there is little other evidence we have been provided to go on since then. No matter how much time wears on, the world loves indulging in that old school revolution of synths – so when will Blondie deliver the goods?
Sorry to be a disappointment, but the honest answer is that no one, not even the clued-up bigwigs of the music industry, can offer any concrete information. That’s not just because they’re tied to contracts and non-disclosures, but because of the sheer fact that Blondie have been one of the biggest question marks for a number of years. All we know is that it should be sometime in the spring of 2026.
What have Blondie said about High Noon?
Putting all their hardships of the past few years temporarily aside, it is clear that the time for a new Blondie record is well overdue, now almost a decade on from their previous album, Pollinator, in 2017. Yet High Noon, in whatever form it may eventually take when it finally hits the world, is set to have a torpedoing emotional current in its midst.
This is down to the fact that the album will feature the last ever pieces of drumming that the late Burke ever performed, so it is not known at this stage how the album may have evolved to honour his memory since his passing. In any case, Harry has called in reinforcements. “With Blondie albums, we’ve always tried to present a lot of different tempos and feelings and represent a couple of genres in rock and pop,” she previously shared.
She added, “We did a couple of songs that John Congleton wrote, and we have a Johnny Marr song. I love it!” With the American record-producing maestro Congleton also at the helm of this project, despite being many eras and decades down the line from where they began, Blondie are clearly not ones to back down from a challenge.
The past nine years since Pollinator have thrown up a lot of change for the band, in both good ways and bad. Perhaps now more than ever, how they proceed from here will be as important to their legacy as the classic cuts of Parallel Lines and Plastic Letters. The ball is very much inside Blondie’s court.
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