EXTREME's Long-Awaited New Album Is 'Pretty Much Done'

During an appearance on this past Tuesday's (February 25) episode of "Trunk Nation: L.A. Invasion" on SiriusXM, EXTREME guitarist Nuno Bettencourt confirmed that the band is putting the finishing touches on its first new album since 2008's "Saudades De Rock".

"It's done in a sense where it's done," he said about the new LP. "As a matter of fact, Gary [Cherone, vocals] flies back in tomorrow, into L.A. He's doing a few touch-ups — some stuff that we did, a few fixes; stuff we changed, lyrics we changed in the songs. But that's it. He's doing the final touch-ups. All the guitars, bass, drums are done. Mixes are pretty much done."

As for a possible arrival date for the new album, Nuno said: "The release is really gonna depend on a label. The good thing about not releasing anything for a while is we're free and clear of, I think, anything that we had, which we're really excited about because I haven't been this excited about an album in a long, long time. It's probably one of the hungriest-sounding EXTREME albums I've ever done. It's heavy and it's full of fire. I would say that this is even probably Gary's best album he's done. This is his album, I would say."

Asked why it took EXTREME 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, 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.