Punk icon Iggy Pop has been holed up in "a little cottage in the boonies on a little river" in Florida writing music with his old band the Stooges. The as-yet-untitled set, the legendary rock act's first since 1973, is due out next year via Virgin and will be produced by Steve Albini. It will also feature several tracks produced by Jack White (White Stripes, Raconteurs).

The Stooges will also embark on their first full-blown reunion tour, having previously focused on the festival circuit and one-offs since reassembling in 2003. At deadline, the lone date confirmed is an appearance in December at the U.K.'s Nightmare Before Christmas festival, which will be curated by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.

"All the same passions and problems are there," Pop tells Billboard of writing with Scott and Ron Asheton. "But the problems are in a more muted style. I'm still the showoff in the group that gets all the attention. Everyone has their role. It's pretty much the way it was in high school."

Asked to describe the project's musical direction, Pop offers, "We experimented a lot. We're stubborn people. We could have just started out and in 10 minutes we would have sounded like us, but that would have been too easy. We'd have these get-togethers every two or three months for four or five days and bang out stuff. As time went on it started to sound more and more like us."

Pop admits that at this point in his career he has "sort of run out of ideas" and that the prospect of a Stooges reunion was an outgrowth of his 2003 studio album, "Skull Ring."

On that effort, he "just threw it open and did a guest-oriented album. I had resisted doing a Stooges reunion, but when I was putting 'Skull Ring' together, [the Ashetons] were getting really active on the road playing Stooges songs. Suddenly they were in sight and in mind. I thought, 'If I'm going to try a couple tracks with Green Day, why not get the original band?'"