It took Eels four years to follow up Blinking Lights And Other Revelations with 2009′s Hombre Lobo LP. E filled that stretch by releasing useless trinkets and soundtracking Zooey Deschanel movies, but clearly that time left him with a backlog of material fit for album-format consumption. The forthcoming End Times is out in January, just seven months after Lobo, and has offered a lead single in the form of the scuffed gem “Little Bird.” In it E takes the shape of a downtrodden front-porch fingerpicker, singing about the hole in his heard to his “only friend” (see the title) through bleary eyes and and a voice on the verge of tears. Either the album art was drawn in direct response to this song, or End Times is going to be the most devastating Eels songcycle yet.

You can download the MP3 for the price of an e-mail:

Sad, beautiful. End Times is out 1/19/10 via Vagrant. Here’s how it’s titled:

01″The Beginning”
02 “Gone Man”
03 “In My Younger Days”
04 “Mansions of Los Feliz”
05 “A Line In The Dirt”
06 “End Times”
07 “Apple Trees”
08 “Paradise Blues”
09 “Nowadays”
10 “Unhinged”
11 “High And Lonesome”
12 “I Need A Mother”
13 “Little Bird ”
14 “On My Feet”

UPDATE: Here’s the video, starring E and a little bird.