Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts will release their second album, Second Song, on September 18, with the title track — an acoustic ballad that runs past 11 minutes — available for streaming now (Rolling Stone).

The album is the follow-up to 2025's Talkin' to the Trees and arrives with a seven-song track list: 'The Foggy Edge Of Time,' 'Day After Day,' 'Earth Girl,' 'Second Song,' 'Casting Me Away From You,' 'Soon I Might Be Going,' and 'I'll Love You Forever' (Rolling Stone).

Five of those seven tracks are new works Young wrote while in Colorado around the turn of the year. The band recorded all five in two days — four on the first day, the fifth on the second — according to a "Moon to Moon" article on Young's official archives site (Neil Young Archives). The full seven-song album was recorded in March at Rick Rubin's Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, California, with Young and Lou Adler producing (Rolling Stone).

The Chrome Hearts lineup reads as a blend of generations and pedigrees. Guitarist Micah Nelson, organist and pianist Spooner Oldham, drummer Anthony LoGergo, and bassist Cory McCormick make up the band (Rolling Stone). Oldham's credits stretch back to the Muscle Shoals studio scene of the 1960s; Nelson, son of Willie Nelson, brings a considerably more recent entry point.

The two remaining tracks on Second Song are not new at all. 'I'll Love You Forever' and 'Casting Me Away From You' date from Young's teenage days on the mid-1960s Canadian music scene — songs written before his move to Los Angeles and the formation of Buffalo Springfield (Rolling Stone).

The title track, now streaming alongside the album announcement, is described as a meditation on the passage of time and the need for human connection (Rolling Stone; Stereogum).

What makes the album's shape unusual is the compression. Two days for five songs is fast even by Young's well-documented standards of working quickly in the studio, and pairing freshly written material with songs he has carried since his teens places the new and the very old side by side on a single record. The result, at least on paper, is an album that spans roughly six decades of songwriting in seven tracks.