Leonard Cohen rumoured to release new album next month

Leonard Cohen celebrates his 80th birthday next month, and will mark it by releasing a new LP entitled Popular Problems, according to Rolling Stone.

The news was reportedly unveiled in the programme notes for the Leonard Cohen Event, a fan-run event held in Ireland on 7-10 August. Writing in the foreword, Jarkko Arjatsalo, who runs Cohen’s official website, said: “Leonard has worked hard on his next studio album of entirely new songs. He asked me to let you know that Popular Problems will be out at the end of September, shortly after his 80th birthday.”

Although Cohen’s UK representative could not confirm the album’s release to the Guardian, Arjatsalo often acts as a liaison between the singer and his fanbase. Also stoking the speculation surrounding a new album is rock biographer Sylvie Simmons, who penned I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. Simmons posted a message onto her Twitter on 8 August: “A new Leonard Cohen studio album – yep, as good as done and due the last week of September, just after his 80th birthday. Amazing!”

Various sources have also noticed that Amazon France list the album on its pages, with a release date of 22 September.

The bi-annual Leonard Cohen Event was initially hosted during Cohen’s silent period when the singer embraced Buddhism and entered the Mount Baldy Zen Centre to live in seclusion as a Rinzai monk. Fans have since gathered in locations such as Greece, New York and Berlin to celebrate the singer’s career.

Leonard Cohen last released an album in 2012. Old Ideas, the singer’s twelfth studio album, was his highest-charting release in the United States and topped the charts in eleven countries.