Weller returns to Parlophone with Find El Dorado

Paul Weller will release Find El Dorado on 25 July, a set of reinterpretations rather than a conventional covers album. The record marks his return to Parlophone. Two digital singles, including Lawdy Rolla, are due on 21 May.

Weller has framed the songs as pieces he has carried for years, now reimagined with fresh meaning. The project is presented as a map of his emotional and musical DNA: less a tour of other people’s hits than a chart of the music that has stayed with him.

Collaborators confirmed for the album include Hannah Peel, Declan O’Rourke, Robert Plant, Seckou Keita, Amelia Coburn and Noel Gallagher. The guest list spans generations and idioms — Plant from the Led Zeppelin lineage, Gallagher from Oasis and his later work with the High Flying Birds — without turning the record into a duets showcase. The centre remains Weller’s reading of material he did not write but has lived inside.

From the Jam to 66

Weller first came to wide notice with the Jam in the late 1970s. After that band dissolved in 1982, he changed course with the Style Council, active from 1983 to 1989, before establishing a solo career with his eponymous album in 1992. Wild Wood followed in 1993; Stanley Road arrived in 1995 and became one of the cornerstones of that solo run. The decades since have brought a steady sequence of studio albums, live sets and side projects, through to 66 in 2024 and its companion release Supplement: 66 the same year.

Find El Dorado sits downstream of that long arc. After a run built largely on original songs, a full album devoted to other writers’ material is a deliberate turn: not a pause in the craft but a different way of showing what has shaped it. For an artist whose name is still tied, for many listeners, to the Jam’s taut early singles and to the broader Mod and soul-inflected British pop he helped define, the choice underlines how wide his listening has always been.

The return to Parlophone is part of the same story. Label homes change across a career of this length; bringing a project of this kind back to that imprint ties the new work to a familiar industrial frame even as the repertoire looks outward.

What is set, what is not

The announcement was made on 15 September 2026. Fixed points are the two digital singles on 21 May, one of them Lawdy Rolla, and the album on 25 July. No full tracklisting has been issued beyond those initial singles, and further detail on formats has not been confirmed.

That restraint fits the way the record has been described. If Find El Dorado is a map rather than a standard covers collection, the interest lies less in a complete list of titles on day one than in how Weller and his collaborators reshape the songs once they arrive. Plant’s and Gallagher’s presence, and the contributions of Peel, O’Rourke, Keita and Coburn, suggest texture and arrangement will matter as much as song choice.

For listeners who have followed Weller from the Jam through the Style Council and the solo catalogues — Wild Wood, Stanley Road, the later run culminating in 66 — the album offers a different kind of continuity. The voice and the guitar remain the constants; the writing credits do not. What comes next is the music itself: first the May singles, then the July release, and whatever live or further recorded work follows once the set is out. Formats and the full sequence of tracks remain to be spelled out.