January 27, 2012 Snippets from the entire album leaked today. It's hard to tell what's really going on in some of them, but we can tell that two of the songs were definitely based on old demos. Outta Space is based on Let's Get Rockin' and Big River is based on Big Trouble.
Update: An iTunes preview of the song Beats Workin' reveals that the song is based on the unreleased song Put Out the Lights. (via @vhlinksdotcom)
January 25, 2012 Rolling Stone released 90-seconds of a new song today, Blood and Fire. Here's what we know...
The song first appeared in the score for the movie, The Wild Life. The Van Halen News Desk says the song in the score is the same song as Ripley, an unreleased tune from the 1984 sessions, recorded with a Ripley guitar (a guitar capable of panning each string to the right or left in a stereo recording). We're just going to take their word for that, because the band has never acknowledged (publicly) that Ripley was used for the movie and the title Ripley does not appear in the credits for the movie. It does sound similar to Top Jimmy, however, which was also recorded on a Ripley guitar.
The intro also seems to have a bit of No More Waiting (or Take Me Back as it later became).