Yes’ first new album in eight years, 5 Things to Know 

Yes began work on its new album, “The Quest,” late in 2019 prior to the onset of the pandemic. But the pause gave the group more time to concentrate on the 11-song set, which comes out Friday, Oct. 1, and is the quintet’s first new album in eight years.

“The Quest” was produced by guitarist Steve Howe and is configured as a two-disc set, with eight songs on the main disc and three more on the second. Much of it was done virtually, with the core group — Howe, drummer Alan White, vocalist Jon Davison, keyboardist Geoff Downes and bassist Billy Sherwood — augmented by guest percussionist Jay Schellen. Longtime Yes artist Roger Dean created the cover.

It marks the first studio album by this lineup of Yes, and the first since founding bassist Chris Squire died in 2015 from leukemia. Yes has plans to return to the road next May in Europe, by which time Howe and company hope “The Quest” will have been embraced by the band’s fans.

• Howe, 74, says via Zoom from England that Inside Out Music chief Thomas Waber reached out during 2019 to see if Yes was ready to make a new album, and the guitarist and Davison met in Sussex to start writing material. “I put myself forward to produce, ’cause I was tired of handing it to someone who sometimes didn’t full know what this band was. That’s always a mistake. This time I said, ‘Look, if it’s going to get my full commitment then I’d really like to produce, because I think that’s where we’ve been misled before.’ The others agreed, and we were off and running.”

• Having to do a great deal of “The Quest” remotely did not phase the band, according to Howe. “We’ve all got used to doing that file sharing thing over the last 10 years, so it was only that we had to optimize on that method and see how well we could work under those conditions, which actually had some pros and a few cons, but mostly pros. It meant there was a convergence, if you like, of ideas, and I was able to sift and I was able to direct and say, ‘This is the one, that’s maybe not the one. …’ And Jon did a great job, not only stepping up to the vocals much more, but also collaborating with Billy and Geoff like he did was very good. Basically we just found it was possible to do it this way, and it had its good side.”

• Despite those circumstances, Howe says, the pandemic did not overtly inspire songs. “‘A Living Island’ is the only song that is really about COVID, and that ends the album. That’s all we want to say about that. It’s a wonderfully emotional track, and it tells the story about two people grappling with the restrictions and the fears and dangers of the time. But something like ‘Damaged World’ was really written before COVID and wasn’t so much about ecology than really about people’s relationships and how damaged that can become because of a lot of things in the world. So you can add COVID into that, because it’s a right mess out there right now.”

• Time, Howe says, has allowed Yes to become comfortable with “the idea there could be another Yes record without Chris” Squire. “We don’t underestimate the impact of that, but (his death) was some time back, and we’ve done a lot of work since that happened, and I guess we’ve become a better team. We’ve become a closer team. We’ve suffered. That was what we had to contain. We had to get things in a mode where the mixing and the bass playing in particular was credible and satisfactory, but more than that, that it had respect for what’s come before and taking the styles of all the past members of Yes and conglomerating them into sort of a new Yes. That was my goal.”

• Howe says the two-disc configuration of “The Quest” was also a record company suggestion, “feeling that the bulk of it, the main album, should not go over 45, 50 minutes. So that’s eight songs, and the other three aren’t really bonus tracks in the sense they’re things we would have thrown away. We weren’t scraping the barrel or anything just to fill it out. They’re like high-quality reserve tracks, if you will. But it’s not so much a double album like the White Album by the Beatles. It’s more like there’s a second part of the story.”