Godsmack singer Sully Erna was recently interviewed on Minnesota radio station 93X and confirmed that their new album, “Lighting Up The Sky”, will probably be their last. The full 20 minute interview is below.
“It’s the most important record, I think, we’ve ever written and recorded.”
Erna went on to say, “I’ve never been that artist who says, ‘Oh, this record is our newest record. It’s our best work ever.’ You can read any interview you want over my whole career, and you’ve never heard me say it. I’ve always loved our records [and] I always knew there would be some good singles on it and hoped it did well, but I was never the guy that said, ‘This is our best fucking work ever.’ And I’m telling you right now this is our best fucking work ever. And it’s because it’s emotional, man. This is the last record we’re ever gonna do. 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 continued, making it clear that while they won’t be making new albums, they will continue to play live shows, “I wanna make sure people are clear about what we’re saying here. I’m not saying that the band may be breaking up. 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.”
Erna says you should expect the new album to be released in February ’23 and then they’ll hit the road touring, “That’s forever now. It’s forever now. From the point we start touring, we will always tour. We may take some breaks here and there, but we’re now gonna start setting up the greatest-hits show, because we feel like we’re able to do that. We can now play the best of the best that the fans have identified as what they’ve enjoyed the most over the years and why these songs became hit singles.”
Erna said “Lighting Up The Sky” doesn’t represent “an ending” but is rather “a new beginning. This is a new beginning of an era — it’s the beginning of our sunset years. And in our sunset years we wanna create something really special for the fans live where we can take every cool moment that we’ve ever done in every album cycle — the ‘Awake’ album had certain things we featured in the live show; the ‘Faceless’ record had certain things we featured from the live show; and so on — now we can create a montage of all those special things in each tour and just do a ‘holy crap’ show. That’s what I wanna create.”
Are you bummed out that Godsmack’s new album will be their last?