The Raconteurs Are Recording Broken Boy Soldiers' Successor

The Raconteurs have been in Nashville for the last week-and-a-half working on their next album.

Group member/producer Jack White told Billboard.com that the band have written 12 songs so far at Blackbird Studio in the country music capital, where The White Stripes also recorded their forthcoming Icky Thump album.

The as-yet-untitled sophomore disc follows last year's Broken Boy Soldiers. The band are working with engineer Joe Chiccarelli (Beck, The Shins, Frank Zappa), who also assisted White on Icky Thump.

White and bandmates Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler are trying to get most of the record done before the Stripes start touring in support of Icky Thump's June 19 release.

"We don't know if we're going to finish, but we wanted to get everything down before we got busy," White said. "We have a lot bigger ideas about certain things, so we will see how far we get."

White described the new songs as being "very different" from those on Broken Boy Soldiers, but he's happy with the direction the album is taking.

Both The Raconteurs and White Stripes records will be released through White's Third Man Records label. Warner Bros. has signed a marketing and distribution deal with the Stripes that apparently doesn't cover The Raconteurs. But the band anticipate clearing that up and getting their LP into stores by 2008. Their first record was distributed via V2 Records, but the restructuring of the label in January left the group looking for a new partner.