My Bloody Valentine have announced a headlining slot at Japan’s Tokyo Rocks festival in May 2013, where they will be playing exclusive material from a brand new album.

The album, the very-long-awaited follow-up to 1991’s classic Loveless, has been 21 years in the making. It will be released on frontman Kevin Shields’ website before the end of the year, and will be followed by a further EP of brand new material.

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In NME’s exclusive interview with Kevin Shields, he says that fans of Loveless will not be disappointed by the new material. “I think with this record, people who like us will immediately connect with something. Based on the very, very few people who’ve heard stuff – some engineers, the band, and that’s about it – some people think it’s stranger than Loveless. I don’t. I feel like it really frees us up, and in the bigger picture it’s 100 per cent necessary.”

Shields also spoke about the festival: “Tokyo Rocks going to be interesting because it’s going to be in a new venue,” Shields says. “Primal Scream played it last year and Debbie [Googe, MBV bassist] played with them, she said it was good so we were like ‘Cool, we’ll do it’. It’s in some baseball stadium, it’ll be the biggest semi-enclosed gig we’ve ever done.”

My Bloody Valentine will headline the 60,000 capacity Tokyo Rocks festival at Ajinomoto Stadium in Tokyo in early May, supported by Illion, the solo project from Yojiro Noda, the singer from Japan’s biggest rock band Radwimps.

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Noda has sold three million albums with Radwimps in Japan but has rarely given interviews. NME secured a rare chat with Tokyo’s answer to Thom Yorke, where he reveals his plans to reach a wider audience outside of Japan.

“If I’m going to do music I want to do it outside Japan as well, and I want to start that while I’m in my twenties. I want to do it to present Japan,” says Noda. “Playing outside Japan is my dream, my goal, but not the dream of the band.”

Noda also spoke about why he’s so secretive in his native Japan. “It wasn’t my intention [to be an enigma] but because I don’t do a lot of interviews, people think I’m mysterious. I don’t mind if listeners don’t know about me, I have my own blog and I’m pretty open – I write about having fights with my girlfriend [Yojiro dates the Japanese film star Usuda Asami].”