SHINEDOWN frontman Brent Smith has confirmed that he and his bandmates are continuing work their seventh studio album. The follow-up to 2018’s “Attention Attention” is being recorded at a new studio in Charleston, South Carolina spearheaded by the group’s bassist and producer Eric Bass.
Speaking to a Detroit radio station about SHINEDOWN‘s plans for the coming months, Brent said (audio below): “I can’t give you exact dates on everything for the new record. I can tell you that we will be looking after summer for release. So that is something I can tell you, as far as new music is concerned, with the new album. What we’re doing exactly right now, Zach [Myers, guitar] is actually going to be in Charleston in about five days, ’cause that’s where we’re recording [the new album] — at Eric‘s studio that we just finished. So he comes in in about five days. Myself and Eric and Zach, we’re putting kind of like the finishing touches on stuff that we were working on previously. Barry [Kerch, drums] is gonna arrive around April, and then we’re gonna cement the recording process of that.”
According to Smith, SHINEDOWN expects to be back on the road in the late summer or early fall. “We’re working with promoters right now, kind of doing an overlay of how it can be done,” he said. “Each day we’re starting to get good news and better news, but we have to be mindful. I know a lot of people are concerned about the variants [of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19], but that’s what viruses do — they mutate. The biggest thing is we need to be able to trust the medical community, trust the people to get us through this. But as far as touring is concerned, we’re locking in [dates]. Fingers crossed, we’re gonna be doing shows — full SHINEDOWN — hopefully by August of this year.”
Last September, Smith told the KLOS radio show “Whiplash” that he and Bass were looking to make a more organic-sounding album this time around.
“We’ve kind of proven that we can make these very large records, these very cinematic, orchestrated records with this wall of sound,” he said. “What we wanna try to do with this album is we do want to hone it back down to drums, bass, guitar and vocals and the best songs that we can write and the freshest songs we can write with the most tenacity and the most ferociousness that we can express. So I don’t think this time around we’re going to necessarily look at the handbook of, ‘Let’s layer this record like we’ve layered other records, and let’s keep adding to it so that it grows.’ I think more the idea of big mono on this album, it’s more about stereo and putting all of the sonics down the middle. But you don’t have a hundred tracks on a song; you don’t take a 22-piece orchestra and bring it in there. We’ve done that, and we’ve done those kinds of records, and we love those records, and we love that sound, but I think what we wanna do with this next record is we really want to focus on being a four-piece band, and let’s see if we can peel the paint off of the walls with just the fury of the four of us in a room.”
In August, SHINEDOWN broke the record for the most No. 1s ever in the 39-year history of the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart, scoring its 16th No. 1 hit with “Atlas Falls”. This also marked the band’s 17th No. 1 on the Mediabase Active Rock chart and its sixth consecutive No. 1, following “How Did You Love”, “Devil”, “Get Up”, “Monsters” and “Attention Attention”.
Originally written in 2013, “Atlas Falls” was first made available from SHINEDOWN‘s vault in March 2020 as part of an exclusive song and T-shirt bundle for the band’s COVID-19 fundraising effort.
