Shout! Factory is proud to announce today that it has signed the legendary Mexican-American five-piece ensemble Los Lobos to a recording contract. Having assembled a body of work diverse enough to cripple most bands and to captivate press and fans worldwide since its inception in 1973, the genre-smashing Los Lobos make a perfect fit with Shout! Factory’s elite, eclectic roster, which houses Rhett Miller, the Von Bondies, Richard Thompson, Tom Russell, and Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs, among others.

“We’re honored to work with Los Lobos, a band that we’ve all been fans of for years, and that has a rich history of unbelievable music. We’re thrilled to be releasing their next project,” says Garson Foos, President of Shout! Factory.

Celebrating 36 years together, the East L.A. vets are marking a new milestone with the commencement work on their 18th record, the highly anticipated debut on Shout! Factory and follow-up to the lauded 2006 release The Town and The City, which drew four-star reviews from Rolling Stone, Mojo, The Independent, and many others.

Not one to repeat the same formula twice, what kind of record Los Lobos will make next is anyone’s guess. “We never really plan any album,” says Los Lobos’ saxophonist/keyboardist/percussionist and producer Steve Berlin. “Like with Kiko and Colossal Head (the quintet’s 1992 and 1996 heady opuses that broke artistic ground both times), we just played the songs that showed up, naturally. With each project, we try to make our songwriting an artistic statement, where the stories we’re telling and the arrangements we’re composing get our point across. But to a certain extent, we make our songs opaque, mysterious. We leave it up to the listener to interpret . . . . That’s the highest purpose of artists, we think – not to rob the spirit out of the work.”

In the meantime, look for Los Lobos on tour. For a handful of select shows only, these prolific musicians have traded their plugged instruments for their guitarrones, jaranas, and bajo sextos for a stunning set list of acoustic verve.