CeeLo Green Readies New Album 'Heart Blanche'

CeeLo Green is putting the controversy behind him and focusing on his music. The soul crooner is back in the lab and readying a new album called Heart Blanche.

According to Billboard, the follow-up to 2010’s The Lady Killer is nearly complete and slated for release in the fourth quarter of 2015.

“We’re actually in the final stages of completing his album. He’s really been hard at work,” says Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman. “We’ve got a big, big list of songs that we’ve been going through, and we’re kind of mixing the final songs now. We’re going to be imminently figuring out his marketing plan and single release schedule, and we’re looking at the fourth quarter [for release].”

CeeLo has collaborated with over a dozen artists and producers including Mark Ronson, Charlie Puth (“See You Again”), Eg White (Adele, Sam Smith), Wallpaper (Jason Derulo’s “Talk Dirty”), and John Hill (Eminem, Florence & the Machine).

“It’s arguably the best piece of work he’s ever done,” adds CeeLo’s manager, Larry Mestel of Primary Wave Entertainment. “It’s very rare to find artists these days that focus on an album as a body of work—most albums these days are just collections of songs, but that’s not the case here.”

As for his leaked TV on the Radio album, he plans to release that after Heart Blanche. “Actually somebody inadvertently posted the project before it was supposed to come out, so we had to have it pulled down,” explains Mestel. “It got critical acclaim during the short period of time it was up, amazing reviews, but it wasn’t time for it to be released—the plan is for it to follow Heart Blanche. And frankly, not everything was cleared, but that’s different now.”