What’s the best part about recording your second album on a major label? Easy: not having to answer any more questions about recording your first album on a major label. Of course, it helps if said debut sells half a million copies, as DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE’s Plans did after its release three years ago. “It’s more of a loose, sloppy guitar-rock record,” singer/guitarist Ben Gibbard says of the May release NARROW STAIRS, recorded in Seattle and produced once again by guitarist Chris Walla. “Even though we said we weren’t going to let the pressure get to us last time, I think in hindsight it was definitely present in the studio, and we wanted to make everything perfect. We’re a really good band, and we don’t have anything to prove to anyone anymore.” Three songs—“Casino Blues,” “Cath,” and “The Ice Is Getting Thinner”— were debuted during Gibbard’s solo acoustic tour last summer, but the first single from the album looks to be the eight-minute-long “I Will Possess Your Heart.”

Green Day aren’t waiting till they’re finished with the proper follow-up to 2004’s American Idiot to put out new songs—a digital EP released in December under the guise of a faux ’60s garage-pop act called Foxboro Hot Tubs hints that Billie Joe and the boys are more consumed with the Nuggets box set than with politically charged rock operas. But it won’t be until the fall that we’ll know for sure….R.E.M. road tested songs from April’s Accelerate—more Lifes Rich Pageant, less everything else they’ve done in the past decade—during dates in Dublin last summer. For a sneak preview, you can hear “I’m Gonna DJ” on their recent live album.…He just started recording, but the Game already knows his next album is going to be called D.O.C. (Diary of Compton), and that it will come out in the spring.…If we told you there would be an album out in September containing songs titled “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris” and “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell,” might you be able to guess the artist? (Hint: rhymes with Schmorrissey.)...And because Moz doesn’t have the market cornered on mope, Dashboard Confessional is currently recording tracks for this

summer’s follow-up to 2007’s stark The Shade of Poison Trees.…Dr. Dre and his humongous delts will finally release Detox later this year, unless for some reason he doesn’t.…Chris Martin continues his mastery of the U2 playbook by enlisting Brian Eno to produce the fourth Coldplay album; obsession with American desert soon to follow.…Also taking a page from the U2 playbook is, um, U2, whose first album since 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is being helmed—and even cowritten—by Eno and Daniel Lanois.…Detroit’s Von Bondies, featuring Jack White’s archenemy, Jason Stollsteimer, debut a new lineup on Love, Hate and Then There’s You, out this summer.…