Signed and Sealed in Blood is the forthcoming eighth studio album by the Dropkick Murphys.
The album is due for release on January 8, 2013 on the band’s Born & Bred Records label. The album’s title comes from the lyrics of the first single, “Rose Tattoo”. The album is their second with producer Ted Hutt (Gaslight Anthem, Old Crow Medicine Show), which was recorded at Boston’s Q Division studios and mixed by Joe Chiccarelli.
Where Going Out in Style told the story of a fictional character named Cornelius Larkin — complete with an obituary written by Michael Patrick MacDonald for the liner notes — “Signed…” has no such constraints. “This is just the opposite of that,” bassist Ken Casey explains, “just us having fun and making the most catchy, singalong kind of songs we can. It’s not that the last album wasn’t fun. It was. ‘Going Out in Style’ is one of the records I’m most proud of, of anything we’ve done. But it gave me a couple migraines along the way, getting through that because everything was so connected. This time we cut loose.” But he does feel that “Signed…” is also “almost a continuation of (‘Going Out in Style’
, in a musical sense. There’s an upbeat, party vibe to it. A lot of these songs, we were having such a good time writing them and just enjoying the writing process. It’s the quickest we’ve released an album, ever, after another.”
The group has been previewing some of the new songs during its Halfway To St. Patrick’s Day U.S. tour, which wraps up September 21, 2012 in Boston. Casey describes the final track, “End of the Night,” as “the closing time, kind of loser’s anthem, about people who don’t want to go home.” The album also features a holiday song called “The Seasons Upon Us,” which Casey promises “is definitely not some cheesy Christmas tune. It’s about a dysfunctional family.”
