Blondie Puts High Noon Out as Burke’s Last Album

Blondie will release High Noon, their 12th studio album and first since 2017, on February 26, 2027, via BMG. The 13-song set is the last Blondie record with co-founding drummer Clem Burke, who died of cancer on April 6, 2025, at 70. Lead single Spectral Eyes, written by Johnny Marr, is out now; Marr had already issued the song himself as a seven-inch B-side after the band took so long to cut it.

Debbie Harry calls the music grounded in the present. The dates, the leftover single, and a tracklist that keeps retrieving old names all pull the other way.

High Noon, Nine Years After Pollinator

The band posted the title, the date, and the single on October 15, 2026, after BBC Radio 2 gave Spectral Eyes its first play at 7:30 a.m. BST. Official copy frames High Noon as a mix of rock, punk, dance music, and Latin rhythms, with Marr, Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, Beirut’s Zach Condon, and Lucius singers Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig woven through the songs. Sessions started in New York in 2022 with John Congleton, who also produced 2017’s Pollinator; David Wrench later came in for more production and the mix.

Harry said the album is classic Blondie, a mix of their influences and eras turned into something new. “This music feels grounded in the present, shaped by who we are and how we’re living now,” she said. Chris Stein, her co-founder, was drier: “It’s been a long, strange ride, and somehow here we are with another Blondie album. I’m not sure what the fuck I’m supposed to say at this point, except that we’re incredibly grateful for all your support over the years.”

The wait the band declared over is only the single. High Noon itself, the twelfth studio album due February 26, is still ahead, and the shop copy is already specific: black vinyl and CD, a limited crystal-clear ecovinyl at selected retailers, and an official-store run of red vinyl and cassette with merchandise bundles.

The wait is over. High Noon, the new album, arrives February 26. The first single, “Spectral Eyes,” is out now. 👁️

Pre-save/Pre-add High Noon and listen to "Spectral Eyes" now: https://t.co/ZrVo5bgN0j pic.twitter.com/jrlxTEnfii

— Debbie Harry/BLONDIE (@BlondieOfficial) October 15, 2026

THE HIGH NOON BASICS

• The album: High Noon is Blondie’s 12th studio album, 13 tracks, on BMG.
• The date: It arrives February 26, 2027, nine years after Pollinator.
• The single: Spectral Eyes, written by Johnny Marr, came out October 15, 2026.
• The drummer: Clem Burke plays on the whole record; he died April 6, 2025.

Pollinator had been the guest-heavy model, with Charli XCX, Sia, Dev Hynes, Joan Jett, Marr, Laurie Anderson, the Strokes’ Nick Valensi, and others walking through. High Noon uses a smaller circle and the same method: Blondie as a receiving station for other writers, then Harry’s voice on top.

Johnny Marr Put Spectral Eyes Out Himself

Marr already had a Blondie song on Pollinator, My Monster, written for Harry. On The Line-Up with Shaun Keaveny in late 2022, he said she asked for another after that one went well, so he wrote Spectral Eyes specifically for the band. They moved too slowly for him to sit on it.

They took so long recording it, I did it myself. It was on the B-side of a seven-inch single. I wasn’t about to put it on an album, just in case, but that’s called Spectral Eyes.

Johnny Marr, guitarist, on The Line-Up with Shaun Keaveny

He also told Keaveny he had written a further new song for the album they were then cutting, and that he did not know if it would stick. The song Blondie chose to open High Noon is the one he had already parked on his own B-side. Four years after that interview, it is the first new Blondie single, with Marr on guitar and backing vocals and Matlock on the track.

The cut itself is bright and hooky, clean guitar lines and a chorus that arrives fast, with more lightness than the early singles and the same slightly off-center pop instinct. That is the present-tense pitch. It is also a song whose writer got tired of waiting and released it without them.

Buyers did not wait on the LP. Under the band’s announcement, people were already posting that they had ordered the limited red vinyl and signed test-print copies, then noting that the wait for the album itself continues into 2027.

What Did Burke Leave on the Tapes?

Harry, Stein, and Burke were the only three people to play on every Blondie studio album, from the 1976 debut through Pollinator. Burke joined soon after the band formed in 1975, left with the rest of them in 1982, and came back for the 1997 return. He was 70. The band said the cause was cancer and that he had kept the illness private. His last show with Blondie was June 19, 2024, at Belsonic in Belfast.

Stein later said Burke was fine when they made the new record. “His situation was very sudden and very fast. It shocked everybody,” Stein said. On July 18, 2025, three months after Burke died, Stein posted a photo of Harry with Congleton and wrote that the next Blondie album should land around the last quarter of that year. A fan asked if Burke was on it. Stein answered in two lines: Clem played the whole thing. Tour, don’t know.

THE ROAD TO HIGH NOON

1. 2022: Recording starts in New York with John Congleton.
2. Late 2022: Marr says Spectral Eyes is already out as his own B-side because Blondie took too long.
3. April 6, 2025: Burke dies at 70 after a private battle with cancer.
4. July 18, 2025: Stein teases a last-quarter 2025 release and says Burke played the whole album.
5. October 31, 2025: Stein says the record has slipped into the first or second quarter of 2026.
6. October 15, 2026: Blondie announces High Noon for February 26, 2027, and puts Spectral Eyes out.

The album the band was already due to release in 2025 left the calendar twice. What did not move is Stein’s credit to Burke. If he played the whole thing, High Noon is not a memorial overdubbed after the fact. It is a finished Blondie record whose drummer died before anyone heard it.

13 Songs, Several Written Outside the Band

Harry said in 2025 that High Noon is a traditional Blondie composite, the format they have used from the start, and that they had taken a few outside tracks. She also said Stein did a lot of the writing and she did a lot of the lyrics. Stein called those lyrics sophisticated, mature, and accessible. The titles the band printed are more revealing than the adjectives.

HIGH NOON, TRACK BY TRACK

Heartbreak Kid reaches for Thunders, the New York guitarist Stein has been circling for years; Burke even played in the L.A.M.F. tribute band with Matlock. Sleepwalking is a Sex Pistol’s song sitting inside a Blondie album. Little Metal Drummer pulls a founding keyboardist back into the catalog. The End sits in the middle of side A. The closer borrows a Blake lyric about a flower tired of counting the sun. That is a lot of looking back for a record Harry says is shaped by how they live now.

Jimmy Destri Wrote This One in 1981

Little Metal Drummer is not a vault scrap. It is a full song from Heart on a Wall, the solo album Destri made at the Hit Factory in New York after Autoamerican, while Harry and Stein were off making KooKoo. Chrysalis issued it in December 1981. The original masters were later lost, and the album has never had a legal CD. The Blondie version is, for most listeners, the first time the song will be easy to find.

The overlap with High Noon is almost too neat. Burke already drummed on the 1981 cut. Harry already sang on it. Stein already played harmonica and lead guitar on that one track. Forty-six years later the same three people are on a Blondie album that restages the song, and one of them is gone.

WHO PLAYED LITTLE METAL DRUMMER IN 1981

• The writer: Jimmy Destri wrote every song on Heart on a Wall and sang lead.
• The drummer: Clem Burke played drums across the album, including this track.
• The guitar: Chris Stein played harmonica and lead guitar on Little Metal Drummer.
• The voice: Debbie Harry sang backing vocals, with Donna Destri and others.

The rest of that session was a downtown pickup band: Earl Slick, Carlos Alomar, Tommy Morrongiello, John Siegler, and producer Michael Kamen. Destri’s 1981 Heart on a Wall credits read like a lost Blondie adjacent record, which is what High Noon is now making official.

After Burke, the Stage Question

Stein has sat out live Blondie dates for health reasons. Harry, speaking as the No Exit deluxe reissue came out on October 31, 2025, made the next step plain. The only original members still doing shows had been Stein, Burke, and herself. Burke was gone. Stein was not playing. She praised the players from the last tour, Matlock among them, and still would not put the name on a substitute lineup.

I just don’t feel comfortable marching out on stage without my original guys and calling it Blondie. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Debbie Harry, singer, on Blondie’s live future

She floated a hedge, “Blondie Presents,” if she ever took a renamed version out. She had not ironed it out. Stein, asked about another album after this one, said he did not know, that he had been dealing with health problems, and that he hoped to get back to making music. Harry applied the same caution to recording that she applied to the stage: maybe a Blondie Presents record, maybe not.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Last concert: Burke’s final Blondie show was June 19, 2024, in Belfast.
• Stein’s credit: He said Burke drummed the entire new album and was well when they cut it.
• Harry’s line: She will not call a show Blondie without the original members.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• A High Noon tour: Stein said he did not know in 2025, and no dates are up.
• Another Blondie album: Both founders left that open and unsigned.
• A renamed live show: Harry’s “Blondie Presents” idea remains a thought, not a plan.

That is why the announcement reads like a last document even though nobody in the band used the word farewell. The record is complete. The touring name, as Harry defined it, is not.

A Blake Poem on the Last Track

High Noon ends on Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time. The title is lifted from William Blake’s 1794 sunflower poem in Songs of Experience, eight lines about a flower that counts the sun’s steps and wants the place “where the travellers journey is done.” Blake’s sunflower is tired of time. Blondie’s album, named for the hour when shadows disappear, closes on that image.

Harry can call the music present-tense. The last title on the sleeve is a poem about wanting the trip over. In between sit a Marr song he released because they were late, a Thunders nod, a Sex Pistols bass line, a 1981 Destri track Burke already played once, and a song called The End. Burke is on all of it. He never heard the sequence with his name attached as the last drummer.

Stein, asked to mark another Blondie album after all that, fell back on thanks. The tapes are finished. The date is February 26, 2027. What the band does with the name after that is a separate question, and Harry has already answered the live half of it.