Jason Pierce has said he’s currently “living in the studio” working on the next Spiritualized album.

Speaking at Reykjavik’s Iceland Inspires Festival, he also told NME that the follow-up to 2008's 'Songs In A&E', due next year, would contain more pop songs.

“I always shy away from anything I write that sounds like a pop song, things like 'Soul On Fire' or 'Stop Your Crying',” he explained. “This time I’m embracing songs like that and seeing what happens. I’m not fighting it any more. I’m in the middle of the album now, so it’s kind of weird doing any shows at the moment. I’m so focused on it. I get really single-minded, so I’m basically living on my own in the studio. I’ve got a rough timeline, it’ll be out next year.”

He added the album’s new sound was partly inspired by the 'Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space' shows he staged last year, which saw Pierce and his band play the 1997 classic in its entirety.

“The shows didn’t change my opinion of the record, it’s still a great album, but it was a dream to play it all live and go through those songs again. Normally when you tour people want new stuff," he explained. "It was weird to have that album sitting around for 13 years and then go and do it, and all of the audience brought their own thing to it."

Pierce performed an ‘Acoustic Mainlines’ set in Iceland’s capital, backed by eight gospel singers and a six-piece string section. He rolled through Spiritualized tracks including 'Anything More', 'Lord Let It Rain On Me' and 'Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space', two Spacemen 3 songs, 'Walking With Jesus' and 'Amen, and also covered Daniel Johnston’s 'True Love Will Find You In The End'.

Speaking of the Iceland Inspires event, Pierce said he accepted the invitation to headline because the people of Iceland had been good to him while making the 'Soul On Fire' video there in 2008.

“Everyone was so helpful," he recalled. "They made a £5,000 video look like it cost £100,000.”

On July 30, Spiritualized will present their much-loved third album, the 1997 intergalactic gospel-garage-soul odyssey 'Ladies and Gentlemen, We're Floating in Space,' at New York's Radio City Music Hall.

Part of a week-long celebration marking the 25th anniversary of Spin magazine, this will be the "only North American show and last performance of its kind," according to a press release. While those words have an air of finality, they're a little ambiguous -- after a series of emphatically received UK concerts, could this really be the last time the band will join forces with a choir, string orchestra and horn section and bring to the stage its magnum opus?

"I don't know," Spiritualized mastermind Jason Pierce, aka Jason Spaceman, tells Spinner. "I didn't write the press release. I don't have the answer to that. I guess so."

What Pierce knows for sure is that, beyond the Radio City gig, he has "no plans" to continue performing the album. Should he close the book on the 'Ladies and Gentlemen' live show, he'll do so having completed what fans and critics alike have deemed a wildly successful experiment -- one that began Oct. 2009, when Spiritualized debuted the full-album show at London's Royal Festival Hall.

Pierce had been approached for years about staging such a performance, but even as top-down run-throughs of classic albums became an industry phenomenon, he was reluctant to dwell in the past. It wasn't until the organizers of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival pitched the idea that he decided to give it a try.

"It's not something I'd want to do all the time," Pierce says. "We'd always been generally pretty forward-looking as a band. It's always been about pushing the thing further out. But it was such a special thing to do. It's such a rare thing to work with this big orchestra. It's just way out of my budget, if nothing else, to do these kinds of shows."

After the initial round of shows, Spiritualized reprised 'Ladies and Gentlemen' in May, performing as part of another All Tomorrow's Parties event, this one in Minehead, England. Despite fears the record's pacing would make for an anticlimactic concert experience, Pierce says the shows have been "amazing and really special."

"It's kind of a strange thing to do, to play a record," he says. "You tend to play the big songs first on a record. When you play [a regular concert], you tend to play the big songs later on. It's all about building drama. It's all about taking people along for the ride."

Now that he's seen it's a ride worth taking, might he consider performing other albums, such as 'Let It All Come Down,' Spiritualized's even more ambitious fourth album, in their entirety?

"Maybe -- I don't know," he says. "It's not in my immediate plans. I'm working on a new record. It really feels quite special, you know? I think that's the other reason why I could do these ['Ladies and Gentlemen'] shows: I didn't feel like it would be the beginning of the end."

Too often, he says, veteran acts revisit old albums as a means of catering to nostalgic audiences unwilling to hear new material.

"I don't think it's like that with Spiritualized," he says.