PAPA ROACH Wanted To 'Shake Things Up' On Upcoming Album

Scotty Mars of "The Scotty Mars Show", which airs on the Live 105 radio station in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, recently conducted an interview with PAPA ROACH singer Jacoby Shaddix. You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below.

Speaking about PAPA ROACH's forthcoming studio album, which is tentatively due in the first quarter of 2017, Jacoby said: "I definitely feel there's a change in the sound of the band on this record, more so than in the past. Our goal was to go in and kind of shake things up on this record. This is our ninth or tenth album — I don't even know now — and we just wanted to kind of go in there and freak it. So when we were picking producers, we wanted to go outside the box, so we picked these two young, up-and-coming producers from Los Angeles Nick [Nicholas 'Ras' Furlong] and Colin ['Doc' Brittain], and got in the studio with these guys. And, you know, they're young — they're, like, I guess in their late 20s, so they're kind of like the younger bucks in the scene. And they were, like, 'Yo, dude, we grew up on listening to P-ROACH, so we know what you guys are about. And let's shake it up.' And so we went in. We started cutting tracks and then I just started rapping on a bunch of the tracks again and kind of bringing some of that old-school sound back mixed with where we have evolved to as a band. And so it sounds like if our first album, [2000's] 'Infest', had a baby with our third album, [2004's] 'Getting Away With Murder', and had a baby in 2016."

Asked about PAPA ROACH's musical and visual evolution since the band's inception more than twenty years ago, Jacoby said: "I feel that's just kind of [happened] organically. It's, like, the image of the band and the style and the image that represents us is evolving, 'cause the style and the sound of our music has always been something that's evolved. And so it's just kind of a natural progression for the band. But this new record, in a way, just feels more 'street,' if that makes sense. It's just grimy and it's edgy and the story telling that I'm doing on this record is reflective of my youth, but then it's also from my perspective now as a man in this world. So it's a powerful record, man. And plus, there's some walls that we broke down that we just got weird. You know, we were, like, 'We wrote records back in the day when we just didn't give a shit, when we weren't thinking about just going, 'All right, let's write the next rock radio single.' 'Cause, you know, looking at music from that lens all the time, or, 'Let's write a hit,' it just kind of makes things a little more stock. And so we wanted to freak the funk, and so we did, with different arrangements and instrumentation and all kinds of different things. It was a fun process."

PAPA ROACH recorded the new album at Steakhouse studio in North Hollywood, California, which gave the band a whole different feel. Jacoby told the "Whiplash" radio show: "L.A. brought a whole different kind of gnarly, rugged street vibe out of our band. I think that's kind of the thing that we lost over the course of our records...it's like, 'Go back and rediscover your struggle, homie. Rediscover what people are going through out on the street.'"

Shaddix added: "I do a lot of work out in the community back home, helping people in need and stuff like that, and I see that the struggle is real. We're in North Hollywood, so it's, like, gunshots are going off, and we're, like, hanging outside the studio. Helicopters are flying over. And I'm, like, 'This is where I need to be making a record.'"

According to Jacoby, PAPA ROACH will "probably leak" a new song "in the next month or two, and then a single before the end of the year."