SHINEDOWN frontman Brent Smith has revealed to Two Doods Reviews that the band is “nine songs into the writing process” for its seventh studio album. “We’re in the demo process at the moment — we’re just writing,” he clarified (see video below).
Last month, Smith told the KLOS radio show “Whiplash” that he and bassist/producer Eric 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.”
This past 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 as part of an exclusive song and T-shirt bundle for the band’s COVID-19 fundraising effort.
SHINEDOWN also recently released its “Live In London” full concert video on YouTube.
