After a 24-year break from the studio, Hot Rize are returning to bluegrass with their new album, 'When I'm Free.'

Band members Nick Forster, Tim O'Brien, Bryan Sutton and Pete Wernick celebrated the release of the album, which hit shelves Sept. 30, with a performance on the season opener of 'Prairie Home Companion.'

"Good things do not have to come to an end!" the show's host, Garrison Keillor, said of the band reuniting.

Hot Rize have been working on the new album for a couple of years. Multi-instrumental band member O'Brien says that they wanted to make sure that even after more than two decades, the release would still sound like them.

"We wanted to make sure the material sounded like Hot Rize songs. We'd ask ourselves, 'Is it a good song?' If we agreed it was, then it was on the table," he tells Mandolin Cafe. "'Does it fit us?' That was another question. The good news is we got together and started hashing all this out a couple of years ago. So you end up going through songs, and what we found out worked best was co-writing. We agreed we needed these kinds of songs but didn't have them."

The band will be touring through the end of the year to support the new release. A list of upcoming dates can be found at HotRize.com.

"I feel really confident about the new material and about the band because until we had this new body of material, we were kind of running out of steam," O'Brien says. "We would do reunion shows, but we didn't have anything new to offer. But now, because everyone has ownership of this new material, we can all put our shoulder to the wheel and push this thing along in the same direction because we believe in it."

'When I'm Free' is available for download on iTunes and Amazon.

Hot Rize, 'When I'm Free' Track Listing:

1. 'Western Skies'
2. 'Blue is Fallin'
3. 'Come Away'
4. 'Sky Rider'
5. 'You Were on My Mind This Morning'
6. 'Doggone'
7. 'A Cowboy's Life'
8. 'I Never Met a One Like You'
9. 'Burn It Down'
10. 'Glory in the Meeting House'
11. 'I Am the Road'
12. 'Clary Mae'

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