When Saturday Night Live returned for its 50th season at the beginning of the month, many (our Editor-in-Chief among them) were surprised and delighted to see the Lonely Island boys produce their first music video for the show since 2018 with "Sushi Glory Hole." Now, Andy Samberg (who left SNL in 2012), Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer have opened up about getting the band back together — and there's more new music to come.
On the latest episode of the aptly titled The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast, the trio gave a behind the scenes look at how "Sushi Glory Hole" came to be and additional Lonely Island Material in the pipeline.
"So I established that I heard this song 10 months ago in a car. Like, fully — everything about it was done. It was finished music ten months ago," Meyers said. "I'm assuming [it's] not one isolated song?"
"Seth! What an interesting query," Samberg replied. "Well, truth be told, during the writers' strike, we were sitting on our hands a little bit, doing our proper nothing," he answered, referring to last year's Writers Guild of American (WGA) strike, which lasted nearly five months. "And we were like, what can we do? So, we did kind of hop back up in the studio, and we did make some songs."
Samberg clarified that they were unclear on just how many songs they have, "because we're not sure how many we deem releasable." Schaffer added, "And there's still a bunch that are half-songs that we're like, 'God, if we could get some time to go back in the studio and crack the rest of that one.'"
When Samberg asked if they had had any ideas that they had fully bailed on (an unequivocal "yes") or songs they wanted to throw out, Taccone interjected, "Well, no, because what if we do like, a deluxe edition..."
With the exception of 2019's The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience and the 2016 soundtrack to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, the Lonely Island's last full-length release was 2013's The Wack Album — for now!