SOIL Has 'No Excuses' For Not Releasing New Album Of Original Material In More Than A Decade

In a new interview with Moshpit Passion conducted at this month's Wacken Open Air festival in Germany, SOIL bassist Tim King was asked about the lack of new original material from the band following the release of 2013's "Whole" album. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "SOIL is kind of an enigma. It's been something that we've been very proud of for a long time. I guess the best thing to say is we pick and choose our battles. We do things that make sense and when they're gonna be good, like coming to Europe and playing Wacken Open Air festival and a bunch of other festivals and doing headline dates. We don't tour just to tour. We tour when it makes sense and we do things when it's a beneficial thing. With that being said, we are very, very, very long overdue for new material, which me and Ryan [McCombs, SOIL frontman] will not disagree with and we'll talk about all day long. The weird thing about that is we all live in very different areas. I'm not gonna make excuses at this point. We need to do new material.'

Tim continued: "Anyway, we got an offer to do a covers record and re-record old material, which we did during COVID, when nobody was doing anything. And honestly, the covers record I listen to more than any SOIL record that we ever released. I don't know why, but we just really nailed it. I think we did a great job on that. It sounds so good.

"But long story short, we're not gonna release anything else until it's something new, because the fans deserve that," King added. "We've waited long enough. We're long overdue. When the time comes that we have it ready to go, we'll do it. But we have really no excuses for it other than the fact that we suck. [Laughs]"

King went on to say that there are other factors involved in why writing and recording new music with SOIL is taking a lot longer than it used to.

"What is cool is as opposed to SOIL back in the day, when SOIL was our life, we all do different things," he explained. "Our guitarist Adam [Zadel] has his own business, our drummer TJ [Taylor] has his own business. I have the record label. I have my little side project, the death metal band. Ryan got asked to rejoin DROWNING POOL, and instead of being angry and mad about it, we were, like, 'Yeah, do it.'

"Everything's in a very great place," Tim said. "We embrace Ryan doing DROWNING POOL. We embrace what we do with SOIL. Ryan loves what we do with [my death metal side project] EMBRYONIC AUTOPSY. The older we've gotten, we embrace the outside activities to where we might've pulled them a METALLICA-type mentality back in the day, like, 'You can only do METALLICA. You can only do this. You can't do anything else. It's not right.' But now, it's kind of, like, guess what? It's a new era. It's a new thing. We're older, and we understand it more now. So you've gotta do what you need to do to either pay your bills or scratch your itch music or anything.

"But what's great about it is we've rekindled our relationship with DROWNING POOL when we had kind of a falling out before, and now we're all friends," King added. "And it's really awesome to just get along and all enjoy what we're doing. I look at Ryan playing in front of people at a DROWNING POOL festival, I don't get mad at it. I'm, like, 'Wow, cool. He's doing something great like that.' We just played Wacken in front of — what? — 20,000 people, whatever it was. And everybody's just happy for one another. And that comes with age, and it comes with what we're doing now. It's a great, great thing."

Last year, SOIL celebrated its long list of compositional accomplishments with "Restoration", a brand-new set of studio recordings of the band's biggest hits throughout their prolific history. "Restoration" highlighted the band's best musical moments, including smash hit singles "Halo" and "Breaking Down", from SOIL's 2001 award-winning album "Scars".

In August 2022, SOIL released the "Play It Forward" album, consisting of some of the songs that inspired the bandmembers throughout the years. Prior to that. SOIL issued "Scream: The Essentials" in September 2017 via Pavement Entertainment and AFM Records. That effort celebrated the band's 20-year career and featured early recordings as well as alternate versions and mixes.

In March 2023, it was announced that SOIL singer Ryan McCombs had rejoined DROWNING POOL.

McCombs originally hooked up with DROWNING POOL in 2005 and appeared on two of the band's studio albums, "Full Circle" (2007) and "Drowning Pool" (2010),as well as a live album, 2009's "Loudest Common Denominator". He rejoined SOIL after exiting DROWNING POOL in 2011.

McCombs is planning to continue to front SOIL and perform with both bands moving forward.

McCombs, who has lived in Swindon, England since 2018, played his first shows back with DROWNING POOL in March 2023 at Club L.A. in Destin, Florida and at the inaugural Throwdown At The Campground festival in Fruitland Park, Florida.