SHINEDOWN Has Ideas 'Lying Around' For Next Album

SHINEDOWN singer Brent Smith spoke to Meltdown of Detroit's WRIF radio station about the band's plans for the follow-up to 2018's "Attention Attention" album. Asked if he and his bandmates usually revisit old ideas when commencing a new project or if they start with a clean slate, Brent said (see video below): "A lot of times we'll go into it with a bit of an empty slate. It was interesting on the last album, because it was the first time that Eric [Bass], our bass player, who's way more than a bass player, it was time for him to [produce] an entire record. 'Cut The Cord' from 'Threat To Survival', that's his production; 'Diamond Eyes', that's his production; 'Her Name Is Alice', which is a deep-cut fan favorite, that's his production. So with 'Attention Attention', it was time for him to do the whole thing. He had, like, 22 pieces already written by the time we got in the studio, but I think we only used one of those pieces for… I believe it was what we ended up when we wrote the song 'Brilliant' — that was one of the early songs written for that cycle. But then everything else, we just did everything from scratch. 'Okay, we have this, and we need to go back and look at it, but let's just keep going fresh with what we have right here on the spot.'"

Brent continued: "[Eric is] finishing up a project that has been a passion project of his for quite a number of years now, which is this whole story. It's a comic book that he's putting together, and it's pretty amazing. I don't wanna give too many things away about it, because I don't know all the details of it, but I know he's trying to get that ready to be released at some point in time this year also. But when it's time to go in and look at the SHINEDOWN material for this next one, we've got stuff lying around, but knowing us, we'll walk in there and be, like, 'What do you got?' And we'll just start making stuff up. That's usually how it works. We'll get in the room with each other. We may have some ideas and we'll play 'em for each other, we'll grab voice memos on our phone — 'I have this,' or, 'I was working on that' — and sometimes we'll just toss 'em and be, like, 'Quick. Give me a riff. Go. Off the top of your head.' And then it'll just kind of go from there."

If it's not canceled or postponed again, SHINEDOWN's summer tour is slated to run from July 31 through September 12. The "Deep Dive Tour" promises deep cuts and B-sides from throughout SHINEDOWN's career, along with the group's many radio hits.

This past week, Smith clarified his recent remarks about playing live, just a few days after he seemingly suggested that the band would tour this summer as planned no matter what. He told Zippo Encore: "As of right now, [the tour is] all a go. So we're not backing off of that rescheduled timeline." Smith later added: "We wanna do everything safely and we wanna go by the professionals in the medical community... but you can't stay inside forever."