Inside the sessions for the band's latest. Plus: Why they won't tour

Last September, R.E.M. wrapped up the final session for their new album, Collapse Into Now, in Nashville. The next morning, guitarist Peter Buck started driving cross-country to his home in Portland, Oregon. "I like to drive, it allows you to decompress," he says. "I got in my car at 6 a.m. and listened to my iPod for four hours. Then I decided to listen to our record. I remember thinking, 'This is, song for song, the best thing we've ever done.'"
Bassist Mike Mills agrees, calling Collapse Into Now, out March 8th on Warner Bros., "our best record since Out of Time," the group's 1991 hit. "We took the shackles off and wrote whatever sounded good — balls-to-the-wall rockers, slow sad songs, great mid-tempo songs in the tradition of R.E.M. We had quality, top to bottom."
This article appears in the February 17, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 4.

The album also marks a crossroads for Buck, Mills and singer Michael Stipe. It is their last record for Warner, their label since the late Eighties. And after spending 2008 on the road for that year's Accelerate, the trio chose not to tour behind the new album. "We don't tour to prop up records — that's not why we play live music," Mills says. "That's the thing about R.E.M. If we don't feel it, we don't go."