Insane Clown Posse will give its Juggalo fan base with a pair of albums in 2011 — a three-disc compilation of guest appearances and a new studio set that the duo’s Violent J promises will be “the bombest, most devastating thing we’ve put out yet.”
J (real name Joe Bruce) tells Billboard.com that ICP will reveal the name and concept of the follow-up to 2009’s “Bang! Pow! Boom!” — which made a career-high No. 4 debut on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Top Independent Albums chart — at its annual Hallowicked concert on Halloween night in Detroit.
“We’re so excited about this next album,” he says. “We’re really gonna bring it. We have an idea and a grasp on what we should be doing, who we are and what we need to sound like on this next album. I can promise you this; the packaging is so…devastating. I don’t know how it came to us; one day it was just delivered into my brain, like a gift. So as far as Juggalos go, it’s going to be everything they can dream of because what comes with the album is so dope.”
J says he and partner Shaggy 2 Dope (Joe Utsler) have been accumulating song topics and beats and plan to sojourn to producer Mike E. Clark’s studio in northern Michigan, “way up in the middle of nowhere where the only thing going on in our life is that album,” breaking only for a few concerts in Australia and Europe. He also expects that the recording is “just gonna take a lot of time. There’s so much that needs to be recorded. It’s definitely a job, a lot of work. But I’m excited, I’m not bitching.” And like “Bang! Pow! Boom!” the new album will be another entry in ICP’s joker’s card series of thematic albums that “teach the listeners something about themselves.”
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“That’s what people want to hear from us,” J explains. “They want to be excited about what the next character is, what the next face is going to be, what it means, what the underlying story behind the character is. We can do other things as far as EPs and specialty albums and stuff like that, but the bulk of our work, are heart and soul, is gonna be the joker’s cards.”
While ICP is working on the new album, it will release “Featuring Freshness” in February, a three-disc compilation of the duo’s guest appearances with other acts — including Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Three 6 Mafia, Vanilla Ice and assorted artists on its Psycopathic Records label, including a whole disc of collaborations with Twiztid. ICP also recorded new songs with Paris, Above The Law and Tone Tone for the set.
“This is the ultimate collection for people who want to hear stuff we did on other people’s albums without having to get all the other albums,” J says. “It’s a big trip, man. Some of it we say, ‘God, we could’ve come tighter on that one…’ But it moves through different times and different eras, different things we were going through, different ways we sounded over the years. It’s just cool if you’re an ICP fan and you want to hear everything we’ve done outside of our own albums.”
However, ICP is still actively pushing “Bang! Pow! Boom!” J and Shaggy just shot a video for the song “Fonz Pond” and will be on the road until its Old Shit Tour wraps up Dec. 19. “We love that album,” J says. “We want to keep it alive. We’re still very much in the ‘Bang! Pow! Boom!’ era.”