Lighting Up The Sky Tracklist
Lighting Up the Sky is the upcoming eighth and reportedly final studio album by American rock band Godsmack. It is scheduled to be released on February 24, 2023, and it will be the band’s first studio album in nearly five years, since When Legends Rise (2018), making this the longest gap between two studio albums by Godsmack.
While on tour promoting When Legends Rise, news of a follow-up to the album began circulating as early as August 2019 when frontman Sully Erna revealed in an interview with Canada’s iHeartRadio that the band has been preparing to begin the songwriting process for the album.[4] Several months later, in a video message dated March 23, 2020, and shared via the Twitter account of SiriusXM, drummer Shannon Larkin and lead guitarist Tony Rambola confirmed the band has been writing music for the album.[5] Shortly after, and during an appearance on Sirius XM Radio’s Trunk Nation, Sully Erna admitted that, while his band has been compiling some ideas, he was lacking the inspiration to write anything. Nonetheless, he assured the fans that the new album would be finished sooner than later:
“We are gonna focus this year, and I will get it done. I do this every time I have to record a record, I swear to you. I go, ‘I don’t know what to talk about. I have no content. I don’t know what my lyrics are gonna sound like.’ I have nothing. I’m bored. I’m not depressed. I’m not mad. Before, when I was mad, I had so many things to write about. Now I’m not mad anymore. I don’t know how to write songs sometimes when I’m not upset or emotional about something. So, it’ll come. And when it does, I’m sure it’ll be good.”
In a May 4, 2021, appearance on The VR Sessions' “Riff On It”, Sully Erna revealed that the band has written 11 songs for the album in just three weeks, and that the band was in the process of writing the lyrics and laying down all the melodies.[7] in an April 23, 2022, interview with WJRR, Sully Erna said that the band had recorded the new album with a new single expected to hit the airwaves in mid-to-late summer and that the album could be the band’s last.
While being interviewed by Pablo of the Minneapolis, Minnesota radio station 93X, Sully Erna confirmed that Lighting Up the Sky would indeed be Godsmack’s last body of work but went on to clarify that the band won’t be retiring from performing or touring after this album.In an Instagram video posted to Sully’s own account on October 10, 2022, he further assured the fans that the band members “are getting along better than ever” and that they “plan on continuing to tour” long after the album has been released, with a greatest hits-style of touring being planned for the future.
“Lighting Up The Sky” Q&A
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What have the artists said about the album?
Sully Erna:
It’s the most important record, I think, we’ve ever written and recorded.
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.
We went in there with no plan, no ideas — very minimal ideas, just jamming. And, ‘what’s gonna be the topic? What am I gonna talk about now? How many times can I talk about a broken relationship?’ Blah blah blah. And then it just started happening where song after song that was written, as I’m sequencing it and putting it in the order that I would like people to hear it in… We’re still old school and we like an album to have a flow from front to back. I love vinyl — I want people to listen to side A and side B. And this one really told a story. And when I started to realize that, I’m, like, Okay. Let me shuffle these around a little bit more.'
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.
I don’t know what we’re gonna do after this record. And it doesn’t make sense to continue to do music. It really feels complete in a good way, in a positive way. We feel like we’ve honored our career, our relationships with our fans, and we’re always gonna be there for them; we’re gonna do shows. But as far as to continue this, after this [album], unless we just decide one day, ‘Yeah, one more for the road,’ I think this could be it for us with new music.
—via Blabbermouth
