ALICE IN CHAINS Is 'Coming To The End' Of 'Rainier Fog' Cycle, Says JERRY CANTRELL

Jerry Cantrell says that ALICE IN CHAINS is almost done touring in support of the band's latest album, 2018's "Rainier Fog".

"Album cycles for us generally are about three or four years long," he told Meltdown of Detroit's WRIF radio station in a new interview. "When we're done with a tour, we usually take some time for ourselves. And then you probably won't see us for a while, because we'll take some time off, and then we'll probably start writing some music and recording it. And that usually takes a couple of years. And then we'll put it out and then go rock it for a couple of years.

"We're coming to the end of the ['Rainier Fog'] cycle," he continued. "It's been a great run. We made a really great record that we're proud of, and people have responded to it really positively. We've gone around the globe a few times already; this was basically our second trip around everywhere."

According to Cantrell, the opportunity to play in several countries ALICE IN CHAINS has never performed in before has been the highlight of the latest run of shows.

"You'd be surprised, with every band, with all of the touring that you do throughout your lifetime, that you haven't been everywhere, but you haven't," he explained. "And on this one, we knocked a couple of cherries off. We never played Russia before, and we got to play Saint Petersburg and Moscow. We had to cancel Auckland, New Zealand early on in our tour, because Sean [Kinney, drums] had injured his elbow at the end of an Australian tour. And so we played that for the first time. We'd never played Greece; we played Athens for the first time. That was amazing. We played Tel Aviv in Israel as well. And Estonia — we'd never been to Estonia, and we played that on this run too.

"That's the interesting byproduct of what you do — you get to go around the globe, where if you weren't doing that as a job, you might not do it at all," he said. "So it's always cool to schedule in some places that you haven't been before.

"The thing that's still magical about it to me, and it was when I was a kid and I figured out that I wanted to do that is that the music travels there ahead of you. If you haven't been to some place for 20 or 30 years, your music still has. So showing up and having fans and having people show up, it's just a cool thing, man."

ALICE IN CHAINS' co-headlining tour with KORN kicked off on July 18 in Del Valle, Texas at Austin360 Amphitheatre and is making stops in Dallas, Nashville, Toronto, Denver and more before wrapping September 4 in Mountain View, California at Shoreline Amphitheatre.

ALICE IN CHAINS' first new studio effort in five years, 2018's "Rainier Fog" marked a few other firsts for the band: it was the group's first album for BMG and its first time recording in their hometown of Seattle in more than 20 years.