During an appearance on Kylie Olsson‘s YouTube show “Life In Six Strings”, EXTREME guitarist Nuno Bettencourt confirmed that the band’s first new album since 2008’s “Saudades De Rock” has been “done for a year now.” He explained: “We were gonna release it last March, and the fucking pandemic came along. We debated and debated, and fans are still busting my balls every fucking day [on social media], ‘Where is that album?’ And it’s hard to explain that it’s, like, we can easily put it out — easily. Just, ‘There it is. It’s on iTunes. Go get it.’, Or, ‘It’s on Spotify. Go get it.’ But we’re a touring band. And it might be a little old-school thinking — we wanna come and play this thing for you, and we wanna release it when we come and play it for you — not at the same time; it’ll be soon. But we wanna be able to put it out and then have you be excited about it, live with it, come see the shows, come here, come there and do it. Now, if the pandemic keeps going the way it is, then we’re not gonna be able to have that fucking cake and eat it too.”
According to Nuno, EXTREME doesn’t yet have a new label home, which is part of the reason the band has been reluctant to release any fresh music during the pandemic. “We were gonna start going to new labels, but labels were shutting down,” he said. “People weren’t making deals. Yeah, there were Zoom meetings and stuff, but they didn’t even know what the fuck was happening with them. People aren’t even going back to offices yet and shit like that. So we didn’t wanna shop the EXTREME album as well in a time where people are going, ‘Really? You wanna talk about doing a record contract when people are fucking dying and we don’t even know what’s happening and the world is shut down?’ So we said, ‘Hit pause.’ And now we’re starting to have meetings again. Over the last few weeks, we started putting deals in place so we can get this thing out. And I’m really, really excited about it, as a guitar player, to share that with you and everybody.”
Nuno previously discussed EXTREME‘s new album during a February 2020 appearance on “Trunk Nation: L.A. Invasion” on SiriusXM. Asked why it took EXTREME more than 12 years to release a follow-up to “Saudades De Rock”, Nuno said: “To be honest with you, we didn’t wait that long. We probably have about three to four albums done. Not ‘done done,’ but we did an album pretty quickly.
“One thing I always said to Gary [Cherone, EXTREME singer], ever since we started this band, is I never wanna release anything that I can’t wait to play people, that I just can’t wait to share,” he continued. “I don’t wanna put out albums just for the sake of putting out albums. I loved the stuff we were doing, but then I started writing some other stuff that I liked better. And then we kind of scrapped that. Then I latched on to something where we thought we had an album done about two years ago, and then I just tapped into these three or four songs. It was a ‘stop the presses’ kind of moment for me, and I went, ‘That’s it.’ It reminded me of when we kind of tapped into [1990’s] ‘Pornograffitti’ back then, to me, where it was a big kind of uppercut. Gary refers to this album as ‘Porno 2.0’ every time he jokes about it, but it’s very much like that kind of excitement for us.”
A live package celebrating EXTREME‘s “Pornograffitti” album was made available in October 2016. Titled “Pornograffitti Live 25 / Metal Meltdown”, it included a DVD, Blu-ray and audio CD recorded at the band’s show at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Casino on May 30, 2015, where they performed the record in full.
