There’s a strange thing we do to bands we love. We discover them, attach a few songs to important moments in our lives, and then quietly expect them to stay there forever.
Apparently, the musicians don’t always get the memo.
Collective Soul has a new song called “Rainbow,” and it opens their 2026 album, Touch and Go. The record first arrived through Record Store Day on April 18 before its wider release on July 31. That makes “Rainbow” a very current reason to revisit a familiar name.
And yes, you can still love “Shine.” Nobody is coming to confiscate your memories.
What interests us is what happens when those memories become the beginning of another discovery.
Collective Soul built its reputation with songs including “Shine,” “December,” and “The World I Know.” Those titles carry plenty of history for longtime listeners. They also create a challenge: once a band’s biggest songs become part of the cultural furniture, people can forget to check whether the band has been making anything else.
A familiar name becomes a familiar playlist. Then the playlist stops growing.
Touch and Go offers a reason to open it up again. The band describes the ten-song album as drawing inspiration from The Cars and new wave. That’s an intriguing direction for listeners whose mental picture of Collective Soul is still anchored in their 1990s breakthrough.
The current lineup brings together Ed Roland, Dean Roland, Will Turpin, Jesse Triplett, and Johnny Rabb. With “Rainbow” placed first on the record, it’s the opening invitation to hear where that group has chosen to go this time.
There’s something encouraging about experienced musicians having influences left to explore. We often talk about an artist’s early influences as though they’re a sealed box: here are the records that shaped them, here is the sound they developed, please proceed to the greatest-hits section.
But an influence can become useful at any point in a career. A musical idea you loved years ago can take on a different meaning after decades of writing, recording, and playing with other people. Experience gives artists more material to work with, including the freedom to follow an old fascination in a new direction.
That’s why “Rainbow” deserves a place in the conversation about Collective Soul now. Before deciding what you expect from the band, give the opening track a chance. Then keep going into the album. You might find something that expands your idea of them.
At Masters Radio, that opportunity is the whole point. We focus on new music from artists who first made their mark twenty years ago or more because we want to hear what they’re doing with the experience they’ve earned.
Their past gives us a reason to be curious. Their new work gives us something to discover.
You already know which Collective Soul songs belong to your memories. “Rainbow” is an invitation to find out whether there’s room for one more.