Richard Thompson has shared Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking, the first single from his 20th studio album. Hippies, Thugs and Heroes follows on October 16th via New West Records, a 12-track set he produced with James Frazee and recorded at Hobosound Studio in Weehawken, New Jersey, a short walk from his own front door.
It’s a hustling London song, and Thompson crowds it with people: a “carousel queen” swamped by the big city, a soldier quoting Shakespeare, “a Kings Road Hippie”, “a Sauchiehill thug”. The playing struts and frays behind them before splintering into a psychedelic solo — a reminder that the guitar work on a Thompson album is never decoration.
That cast is the album. Old friends and false gurus, beloved musicians and former selves, some drawn from life and some invented outright. Thompson only heard them as a single body of work once the recording was done. “You look over the body of songs you’ve written and ask yourself, Which ones are kindred spirits?” he says. “You look for commonality among the songs, and it’s also a joy when you realize that certain songs seem to be brothers and sisters.”
The band is largely the one that made Ship to Shore: Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Michael Jerome on drums, David Mansfield on guitar and fiddle, and his wife Zara Phillips on backing vocals. What changed was what Thompson brought them. His home demos this time were far more worked-out. “It’s so much fun to mess around at home and disappear down in the basement for hours at a time,” he says. “I even bought myself a drumkit. So I was able to present more complete demos to the band. You could say there’s much more of my identity being transferred to the final product.” He still left room for the players to add their own ideas, but calls the album “less them and more me. But I’m never strict about what I want to hear on a record. I’m always interested to see what they come up with, and I always want to see where a song takes me.”
Proximity helped. “I think this is why this album came together so quickly. We could just steam through at high speed and not labor over everything.” The crew cut live, sometimes in as few as two takes and rarely more than four, which is where the record gets its urgency.
Hippies, Thugs and Heroes follows 2024’s Ship to Shore, which Danny Neill reviewed for KLOF Mag. He found nothing there resembling a wind-down: “the Richard Thompson of 2024 is a singer-songwriter enjoying the most vital of late golden periods, producing work to stand favourably alongside any from his previous fifty years.” Thompson had already headed off the retirement question himself — “I’m not intending to hang up my plectrum anytime soon,” he said at the time, “if I don’t write, if I don’t perform, I get frustrated and I feel like I’m not being the human being I should be.”
Speaking to Neill in the same month, Thompson explained that the six-year gap before Ship to Shore had left him with a stockpile rather than a drought. “Basically, covid put a bit of a spanner in the works. Two and a half years really; we couldn’t tour and certainly couldn’t put out a record in that time. So that really hit the schedule pretty seriously. I did a lot of writing, which was very handy. The two EPs that we put out, I wrote this album, I wrote the next album, I wrote a musical play, and now I don’t know what to do with myself I’m so far ahead.” He didn’t say what that next album was.
Hippies, Thugs and Heroes will be available digitally and on CD and standard black vinyl. A limited clear with black splatter vinyl edition with autographed insert, and a limited CD signed by Thompson, come via independent retailers. Rough Trade has a limited pink marbled vinyl edition with an autographed insert and a bonus flexi-disc of the Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking demo. A limited yellow with black splatter vinyl edition with autographed insert and a limited signed CD are available to pre-order now from New West Records.
Thompson’s UK dates all land before the album does. August is festival-heavy, taking in Cambridge Folk Festival, Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, FolkEast in Beccles and Beautiful Days in Ottery St Mary, with a show at St Georges Church Hall in Beckenham in between. September brings Buxton Opera House, Lighthouse in Poole, the Subscription Rooms in Stroud, Bromyard Folk Festival and the Wiltshire Music Centre in Bradford-on-Avon. Two US shows in November, in Elkton, Maryland and Montclair, New Jersey, are the only announced dates that fall after release (see dates below).
Hippies, Thugs and Heroes Track Listing:
- Sorcerer’s Apprentice
- Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking
- Pauper’s Grave
- Unsung Hero
- Make Believe You Don’t Know Me
- She Burns It All
- Everybody’s Stealing
- The Soul In Me
- Pipe Dreams
- The Big Smoke
- Stringer
- Siren
Richard Thompson On Tour:
August 2 — Cambridge Folk Festival 2026 — Cambridge, United Kingdom
August 14 — Fairport Cropredy Convention 2026 — Banbury, United Kingdom
August 21 — St Georges Church Hall — Beckenham, United Kingdom
August 22 — FolkEast 2026 — Beccles, United Kingdom
August 23 — Beautiful Days 2026 — Ottery St Mary, United Kingdom
September 4 — Buxton Opera House — Buxton, United Kingdom
September 10 — Lighthouse — Poole, United Kingdom
September 11 — Subscription Rooms — Stroud, United Kingdom
September 12 — Bromyard Folk Festival 2026 — Bromyard, United Kingdom
September 13 — Wiltshire Music Centre — Bradford-on-Avon, United Kingdom
November 20 — Elkton Music Hall — Elkton, MD, United States
November 21 — Outpost in the Burbs’ Concert for Toni’s Kitchen — Montclair, NJ, United States
Hippies, Thugs and Heroes (October 16th, 2026) New West Records
Pre-Order: http://newwst.com/hippies