Tanya Donelly Reunites Belly, Announces Comeback Album

Belly is back. The group fronted by Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses and The Breeders will release a new album, Dove, on May 4, its first new music in 23 years.

Donelly paired the announcement with the release of the album's first single, "Shiny One," a shimmering, propulsive reflection on the universal struggle between good and evil.

Belly was an alt-rock force in the early 1990s, thanks largely to its breakthrough singles "Feed The Tree" and "Gepetto," but broke up in 1996 after its sophomore album, King.

In an official statement, Donelly says now is the right time to reunite.

"We had just gotten to the point where we were just missing each other, and missing the music," she says. "The music I've been doing in the past several years has been very collaborative, which made me kind of homesick for Belly; I missed that sense of having a band."

Donelly says the new songs on Dove are more collaborative than anything in the band's catalog, even though the group's members are scattered throughout the country. "It required a lot of trust," says Donelly, "because we were sending raw snippets to each other - anything from 30-second pieces to full songs. [Guitarist] Tom [Gorman] and [bassist] Gail [Greenwood] and I would send demos back and forth, and then Chris [Gorman] would add drums to whatever snippets he'd heard, and Tom would sew everything together. It would sometimes be a very circuitous route to a song, but it was really fun."

In addition to the new album, Belly will launch its first tour since 1995, starting with a performance in Boston on May 26.

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