Talking Heads have worked together on New Feeling, an illustrated book arriving on May 18, 2027, in the fiftieth-anniversary year of their debut. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison contribute writing and open their archives, sharing handwritten lyrics, early artwork and photographs. Some objects have remained stored for more than forty years, offering a view of the work behind familiar recordings.
Talking Heads have opened their archives for New Feeling, a large-format book created with all four members. Handwritten lyrics, initial cover designs and personal photographs bring readers closer to the material surrounding the recordings and performances. Scheduled for May 18, 2027, the illustrated volume arrives in the year that marks half a century since the group's debut album.
The announcement came on October 21 through a video showing David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison together around a table. They described the project and the objects they had chosen to share. Their involvement makes it a collective presentation of the band's history, with the people responsible for the music also contributing directly to how that work is documented.
Weymouth emphasized that all four had taken part in writing and selecting the contents. Talking Heads: New Feeling is presented as their first authorized book created jointly by the entire group. It combines items from personal collections with original texts, rather than depending only on an outside narrator's account of the career.
Harrison said some material had remained inside the band's collections for more than forty years. The contents include handwritten lyrics for Psycho Killer and Life During Wartime, connecting readers with the working documents behind two songs from the early catalog. These pages offer another form of access to material already familiar through the recordings, videos and live performances.
Psycho Killer appeared on Talking Heads: 77, while Life During Wartime followed on 1979's Fear of Music. The songs belong to different points in the early development, making their manuscripts useful records of a creative process rather than interchangeable souvenirs. Written material can show the presence of a song before its identity became fixed through the voice and arrangement audiences recognize.
The book also contains annotated concert set lists, artwork sketches and material connected with film productions. Storyboards and backstage photographs from Jonathan Demme's 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense sit alongside items related to Byrne's True Stories from 1986. The selection therefore extends beyond finished album covers into the planning and visual work around different kinds of production.
The return of Stop Making Sense to cinemas in 2023 brought Talking Heads together for public appearances after years without such shared events. More meetings followed in 2023 and 2024. In September 2026, Este Haim moderated another discussion around Talking Heads Radio. The book is part of that continuing collective attention to existing work, rather than an announcement of a new recording partnership.
No new studio album, tour or return to recording has accompanied the project. Working together on an archive volume and appearing at discussions are distinct from resuming the band as an active touring unit. The confirmed collaboration concerns writing, selection and presentation, with the four musicians choosing how to revisit material from the career they already share.
Frantz described the narrative's beginning through three art students at the Rhode Island School of Design who later reached New York's CBGB. Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth connected through those studies before moving to the city. Harrison, previously a member of the Modern Lovers, joined later, completing the four-piece lineup around the group's first recording period.
At CBGB, Talking Heads entered a scene that also included the Ramones, Patti Smith and Television, while developing their own rhythmic and guitar-based approach. New Feeling follows the path from those early appearances through studio albums, international touring and songs such as Burning Down the House, which broadened the group's American audience on 1983's Speaking in Tongues.
Each member has written new material for the book, giving room for separate memories of the sessions and shared experiences. Other contributors include Debbie Harry, Lorde, Questlove, Jeff Bridges, Dave Eggers and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Their texts add perspectives from beyond the four musicians, placing the archive objects beside responses from artists working in different fields.
Eric Skillman handles the design of the large-format volume, which includes hundreds of images across the band's history. Personal portraits, studio photographs and live scenes appear alongside the documents. The May publication falls in the anniversary year of Talking Heads: 77, originally released in September 1977 with songs including Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town, Psycho Killer and Pulled Up.
The publisher currently lists the book at 368 pages, differing from the four-hundred-page description circulated in early coverage. A collector's edition adds a presentation box with a nineteen-piece wooden puzzle built into its cover. These packaging details distinguish that version while the project itself remains the same jointly created archive volume.
A separate expanded Fear of Music reissue is scheduled for November 13, 2026, with alternative recordings, live material from 1979 and rare television footage. That is another archival project rather than part of the book's physical contents. Talking Heads return to the same broader history through different formats, with New Feeling bringing the four members' writing and long-stored objects together next May.
