Songwriter Gregg Alexander names the second New Radicals album

Gregg Alexander has confirmed what the two New Radicals tracks that appeared this summer were building toward. A second album is coming, called Maybe You've Been Brainwashed TWO, twenty-eight years after the first one, and Danielle Brisebois, the only other permanent member the band has ever had, is on it. There is no release date yet beyond early next year, and Universal has not settled which of its imprints will put it out.

He rejects the word comeback and offers his own instead: a slow revival. The reasoning is a matter of ambition rather than modesty. He says the era when every single had to reach number one is gone for everyone, quotes David Bowie's answer on how to beat your rivals, which was to outlast them, and describes his own priority as longevity. He wants records still being played everywhere in fifty years rather than records that work for fifty weeks.

The revival started, partly by accident, with a duet. Michelle Branch was being relaunched globally by BMG with a duets album, and Alexander was approached about a new version of The Game of Love, the Santana hit he co-wrote and Branch sang on originally. Olivia Rodrigo had told him at an Oscar music party that the song was her childhood favourite, so she was one idea; in the end Branch and Alexander enjoyed singing it together enough to release it themselves. It came out in July and has climbed to number 20 at Hot AC radio in the United States.

Two weeks later came One Night Only (Break Loose Break Free!), a New Radicals original written for the film of the same name and their first new song in twenty-eight years. Alexander is clear it is not the record the campaign is built around. He says the official follow-up to You Get What You Give exists and that they want to build up to releasing it incrementally.

The gap in between was not idle. After disbanding the band six months after its one enormous single peaked, Alexander went into the writers' room and stayed there, writing for Geri Halliwell, Enrique Iglesias, Hanson and Rod Stewart, and co-writing Sophie Ellis-Bextor's Murder on the Dancefloor, Texas's Inner Smile, Ronan Keating's Life Is a Rollercoaster, Santana's The Game of Love and Adam Levine's Lost Stars, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2015.

Two of those have had second lives bigger than their first. Murder on the Dancefloor, which he wrote in the early 1990s in a car that would not start on a night he had planned to go dancing, was revived by Saltburn; GQ later ranked its use alongside Scorsese's Gimme Shelter on a list of the best film needle drops. Lost Stars has passed half a billion streams across the Keira Knightley and Adam Levine versions and was performed at the 2015 Oscars despite never being released as a single.

What brought him back to his own name was closer to home and harder. He says that in May 2024, for the first time in decades, he was meeting label heads and looking at offers, and then his father died unexpectedly. He dropped everything for a year to look after his mother, with Brisebois helping, and his mother died as well. The approach that reopened the door came from the reconfigured Capitol and Interscope during a TikTok trend built on a New Radicals lyric.

He was blunt on the subject the rest of the industry is arguing about. "I despise AI and I hope labels protect artistry from it tenaciously," he said, arguing no generated track will ever match a Hey Jude or a Bohemian Rhapsody, and agreeing with Jack Antonoff's view of creatives who lean on it. That puts him alongside Brian May, who used a botched AI album cover to make the same argument this year.

On the commercial question he is disarmingly honest. Nobody knows, he says, whether the album sells 75,000 copies or 7 million, and the music is the message. For an act whose return after 28 years came through a film soundtrack rather than a single, that is a consistent position rather than a convenient one. More pop coverage sits on the hub.