WHAT an announcement for Christmas week! The Jesus And Mary Chain are to release their first studio album since 1998's Munki next spring.

Damage And Joy will arrive on March 24 on ADA/Warner Music as the Reid brothers' long-awaited return to the recording studio after re-forming in 2007 to play the Coachella festival in Indio, California.

Despite touring regularly – most notably a 2015 world tour that revisited their groundbreaking debut album Psychocandy – it took some time before William, 56, and Jim, 54, could agree on a plan to record a much-mooted seventh album.

“We started to – can you believe? – listen to each other a bit more,” explains Jim. “In the last couple of years, we’ve buried the hatchet to some degree, and thankfully not into each other.

"Most people who know us would say that we haven’t mellowed that much. I think it was to do with the fact, dare I say it, that wisdom comes with age. Let’s live and let live, and let’s take each other’s opinions into account.”

To emphasise the point, the raw garage-rock of new track Facing Up To The Facts proffers the lyric, “I hate my brother and he hates me/That’s the way it’s supposed to be”, while the jagged power-pop of The Two Of Us simmers with sibling tensions.

Work on Damage And Joy – a reference to the English translation of the German word schadenfreude – began in September 2015, with producer Youth contributing bass and diplomacy to proceedings during sessions in London, Dublin and Granada, Spain.

First confirmation of a new Jesus And Mary Chain album came from fellow Scot and manager Alan McGee, who told Canada’s CBC Music: “They've made another album! It's a big deal! It's kinda enormous."

The album opens with Amputation, where William's waves of distorted guitar collide with Jim’s insouciant vocal as he rails against “being edited out of the whole music business". "I felt like a rock ‘n’ roll amputation,” he sings.

One further highlight will be a refined and re-energised version of All Things Must Pass, a song first featured in the television show Heroes and then on Upside Down: The Best Of The Jesus and Mary Chain.

The album was recorded with the Scots' touring drummer Brian Young and former Lush bassist Phil King. “The interesting thing about this record is what comes out of the speakers,” says Jim. “To make a good record is an achievement if you’re 22, but to do it in your fifties, the way we are, I think is a minor miracle.”

Damage And Joy will be released on digital, CD, vinyl and cassette formats. The full track listing is: Amputation; War On Peace; All Things Must Pass; Always Sad; Song For A Secret; The Two Of Us; Los Feliz (Blues And Greens); Mood Rider; Presidici (Et Chapaquiditch); Get On Home; Facing Up To The Facts; Simian Split; Black And Blues and Can’t Stop The Rock.

This autumn, The Jesus And Mary Chain undertook a short North American tour that climaxed at the Day For Night Festival in Houston on December 17.