The Who have dropped a fiery new song “I Don’t Wanna Get Wise,” off their upcoming LP Who, out December 6th via Interscope Records.
The track features a thrashing guitar riff with reflective lyrics: “All the shit that we did/Bought us some money I guess/And those snotty young kids/Were a standing success.” The song is reminiscent of the band’s 1975 album The Who by Numbers. “I wrote this in a mid Seventies style,” Pete Townshend said in a statement. “Warning: Don’t get old. You might get wise.”
The band also announced two bonus tracks on the LP unearthed from the Sixties — “Got Nothing to Prove” and “Sand.” The latter will be released on triple red, white and blue vinyl. Townshend recently discovered “Sand” while digging through archive material for box sets. “I was going through and I found this demo called ‘Sand,’ which was a song that I demoed for the Who in 1966,” he told Rolling Stone in January. “I don’t quite know why we didn’t record it, but we didn’t. It’s a song about being on the beach. It’s about a love affair that was built on sand — but quite dark.”
Who is the band’s first new album in 13 years, after 2006’s Endless Wire. “I Don’t Wanna Get Wise” follows the previous singles “Ball and Chain,” “All This Music Must Fade” and “Big Cigar,” the latter of which they’ve been performing live on their Moving On! tour. The band will extend their trek through 2020, playing a handful of dates in the UK before returning to North America for a brief leg in April. Tommy is slated to return to Broadway in 2021.