Florida rockers Shinedown plan to “go for the gusto” on their third album, which the quartet has spent the past 10 months writing and plans to begin recording in the fall.
Frontman Brent Smith tells Billboard.com that he gathered his bandmates together late last year, as it wrapped up the touring cycle for 2005’s platinum “Us and Them,” and told them, “It’s time to just go over the top, literally go above and beyond what a human being thinks they’re capable of recording. We want to do a huge hard rock record that has a lot of crossover potential but also some of the most insanely intense and heavy material that this band has ever tried — and see if we can pull it off.
Smith says the group has more than 40 songs to consider after writing sessions in Atlanta, Nashville and Los Angeles, and is “still writing.” Shinedown plans to road test four “potential singles” from the new batch — “Sound and Madness,” “The Crow and the Butterfly,” “Second Chance” and “Devour” — on a short run of dates it’s currently on.
Shinedown is currently talking to several producers, according to Smith, and should settle on one soon. A title for the album won’t be determined, he says, until the final song list is selected and lyrics are finished, though he’s planning “to talk about everything that’s been going on in my own world again, and everything else.”
Smith also confirmed that Shinedown has scuttled plans to release a DVD from a show it taped on Dec. 12 in Knoxville, Tenn., which it originally planned to have out in July. The singer says the band, the DVD producers and its label, Atlantic Records, “couldn’t come to agreement” about the project. “We don’t want to put anything out if the band is gonna be presented in the wrong way,” Smith says. “I might be able to bootleg it later on … but as of now I don’t see it coming out.”
