The four boys from Liverpool will be back for their final hurrah. A new and final Beatles recording with artificial intelligence extracting John Lennon’s voice from an old demo will be released later this year, confirmed former Beatle Paul McCartney on Tuesday.

The former Beatle said during a BBC Radio 4 programme that state-of-the-art technology was used to separate the voices of each band member from background sounds during the making of Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back.

“The last Beatles record” will come out almost five decades after the British boy band’s dissolution in 1974. Comprising John Lenon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the Beatles became a global phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s, prompting the Oxford English Dictionary to add a new word — Beatlemania — to its list of English words. Lenon was shot dead by a deranged fan in New York in 1980, while Harrison passed away in 2001. McCartney and Starr are the only surviving members of the band.

“Jackson was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano. He could separate them with AI; he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’,” McCartney told BBC radio.

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on. We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do. It gives you some sort of leeway,” the musician explained.

The 80–year-old musician didn’t identify the name of the demo, but the BBC and others speculated that it could be an unfinished 1978 love song by Lennon called Now and Then.

According to a BBC report, the demo was included on a cassette labelled For Paul that McCartney had received from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.

McCartney described AI technology as “kind of scary but exciting”. “We will just have to see where that leads,” he said.