The Sisters Of Mercy cancel concert at this year’s Brutal Assault to move up the recording schedule for their new album
The Sisters Of Mercy
At Side-Line, we have often reported (and joked) about a new The Sisters Of Mercy album being in the works, but this time there is a little more to go on than rumour. On March 12, the Czech festival Brutal Assault said the band canceled its 2026 appearance “because it had moved up recording work on a new album”. The festival added that it is already in talks to bring the band back for next year.
We already reported in 2022 that The Sisters Of Mercy had written thirty new songs during the corona years. At the same time Eldritch said that a new record was highly unlikely “because making records is a great way to lose a lot of money”. Ben Christo gave a more open answer in August 2025. When asked whether there were plans for a new studio album, he said: “there are no plans to record an album, there are no plans not to record an album.”
If the recording schedule mentioned by Brutal Assault indeed leads to a finished release, it would mark the first The Sisters of Mercy studio album since “Vision Thing” which the band released in 1990.
About The Sisters of Mercy
The Sisters of Mercy are an English gothic rock and post-punk band formed in Leeds in 1980 by Andrew Eldritch and Gary Marx. Their first release was the single “The Damage Done / Watch / Home of the Hit-men”, issued on their own Merciful Release label after the band pressed 1,000 copies to get the record on the radio. In 1981 the group shifted to the drum machine Doktor Avalanche, with Craig Adams joining on bass.
The Sisters Of Mercy then started regularly releasing new material: “Body Electric”, “Alice”, “The Reptile House E.P.” and “Temple of Love”. Ben Gunn joined as second guitarist in late 1981, and Wayne Hussey entered in 1984 as The Sisters Of Mercy moved toward its first full album and signed to WEA. “First and Last and Always” was released in 1985, and was the only studio album by the Eldritch-Marx-Adams-Hussey line-up.
After the 1985 split, Adams and Hussey left and Eldritch continued through the related Sisterhood project, releasing “Gift” in 1986. The next The Sisters Of Mercy album “Floodland” landed in 1987, largely built around Eldritch and Patricia Morrison, followed by “Vision Thing” in 1990 with contributors including Andreas Bruhn, Tony James and Tim Bricheno. In 1992 the re-recorded “Temple of Love (1992)” with Ofra Haza reached No. 3 in the UK, and “Some Girls Wander by Mistake” collected the band’s early independent material.
The band stopped releasing new studio albums after the early-1990s dispute with East West, but never fully disappeared as they continued to playing live. Side-Line has also covered the band’s later activity, including the report that they had 30 new songs ready in 2022, the first U.S. tour in over a decade in 2023, and their live-first release strategy in 2024.
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