Shinedown singer Brent Smith said in an interview with Los Angeles radio station KLOS that the band intends to begin writing its seventh studio album later this spring, with the intention of releasing the LP around June 2021. Smith explained, “We're not really gonna start writing it, I don't believe, until after the 'Deep Dive' tour, so we're not looking at even beginning Shinedown VII, the writing phase, until probably late May, the beginning of June this year.”
The vocalist told us that the band's follow-up to 2018's Attention Attention will take another creative left turn: “I will tell you that the next thing that we do is completely different than anything that we've kind of tried to do. We've tried to do this in the past, but we just weren't ready for it. I don't mean to be so ambiguous about it, but I think people are gonna be really, really jazzed about it.”
In the meantime, Shinedown is finishing up a movie based on the Attention Attention album, which has been in the making for several years. It will edit together the videos that the band has released from the record, along with new material, into a feature film that revolves around the LP's themes.
Smith also said that he and Shinedown guitarist Zach Myers are going to record a new Smith & Myers album, for release sometime this fall. The duo issued an acoustic EP of six cover songs in 2014, but Smith revealed that the new project will be much more expansive, explaining, “We're gonna do a double album, so we're gonna do 10 covers, or tributes — however you wanna put it — and we're gonna do, for the first time, 10 original songs, me and Zach, for that project.”