Sully Erna Says New Godsmack Album Is "The Last We're Ever Gonna Do" | Revolver

Sully Erna Says New Godsmack Album Is "The Last We're Ever Gonna Do"

But they're not breaking up
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Yesterday (September 28th), Godsmack dropped their first new song in four years, "Surrender," the lead single off their upcoming eighth studio full-length. Now, in an interview with Minneapolis, Minnesota, radio station 93X, frontman Sully Erna has revealed the title of the LP, Lighting Up the Sky, and confirmed that the album will be the band's last collection of original material.

"This is the last record we're ever gonna do," Erna said, as transcribed by Blabbermouth. "This is the last run around the mill for us. We put every single ounce of energy and emotion into this album. Especially for me, when I wrote a lot of these songs, it was about my life journey. That's really what the sequence of this album becomes about. Not that it was planned that way, but this really kind of mystical thing happened where I felt like the universe wrote this record."

Erna clarified that, while Lighting Up the Sky will be their last album, Godsmack will continue to play live. "I wanna make sure people are clear about what we're saying here. I'm not saying that the band may be breaking up," he explained. "What I'm saying is I think this may be the last body of work you get musically from the band. And it's because we're in this place in our lives right now where we've done a lot of work over the last three decades. Without sounding egotistical, which we're not trying to do, we're at 27 Top 10 singles, 11 Number Ones. We could literally do back-to-back nights in an arena and play 15 songs a night and never play the same single twice, let alone the 'B' cuts. And we started thinking, when we were in that thought process, why are we in here grinding all the time and doing this new music when we wanna just also know that we've never stopped in the 25 years we've been touring. We'd like to be able to enjoy our lives, our family, our houses, the things that we've earned over the years that we've sacrificed. So I think the balance for that, the happy medium, is to be able to just go out there now and continue to do live shows and put the greatest-hits show together."

According to Erna, a big part of the decision to make this Godsmack's final album was his realization that many fans are no longer interested in new music from a band that has been around for as long as they have. (Formed in 1995, Godsmack are approaching the three-decade mark.)

"As a music lover and a fan of live shows and bands, in general, when you go see your favorite bands, there's a certain point in their career where you just go, 'I don't really give a shit about a new record anymore," Erna noted. "I'm sorry, but I wanna hear 'Dream On' and 'Train Kept a Rollin'' and 'Same Old Song znd Dance'. I don't wanna hear any of this new shit. I don't know it and I don't care. But these other songs have lived with me for two, three, four decades,'", he said. "And I just feel like we're getting to that place where … If we get out there and we don't play 'I Stand Alone' or 'Keep Away' or 'Voodoo' or whatever these songs have been for these people over the years, they ream us for it. So we know we're stuck with that. We're always gonna play the hits. But we have so many singles now that it's time, I think, to try to pull as many as we can off this record, add it to that list and then go out there and play the best of the best. And then maybe throw a few surprises every show, whether it's the drum battle or some fun cover."