Godsmack Swears They’re Done Making New Music, Want to Focus on Playing Live
Butt-rock kings Godsmack have been going back and forth for a while now about whether or not their 2023 album Lighting Up the Sky was their final record of their career. But, while the band are still never saying never, it does seem like they want to coast on their existing catalogue and play those songs live until they die.
In a recent interview with Detroit radio station WRIF (transcribed by Blabbermouth), Godsmack frontman Sully Erna was asked to clarify remarks he previously made about whether or not the band will be putting out another record, and Erna insisted that they are done making new music:
“No. There’ll be no more new Godsmack… I mean, you can never predict the future, but the decision that was made was that we’re gonna go out now and start honoring the catalog of music that we created over the last 30 years and just enjoy kind of the greatest-hits moments.”
When the interviewer brought up that a lot artists are focusing on singles instead of albums (which isn’t true, but sure, let’s pretend it is), Erna said that might be an option in the future:
“I mean, it sounds like the smart thing to do these days. Nobody’s really buying full albums anymore. And they make playlists of their favorite songs. So it just seems appropriate for this day and age. But again, [that’s] another argument for us to kind of dip out while we’re still in the world that we enjoyed growing up in, which was doing full-length albums and having artwork and lyrics and give the fans a whole experience through that body of work that you create. And I just no longer wanna put a year, year and a half of my time and effort and blood, sweat and tears into a piece of art for someone to just tear it apart, grab a couple of singles and move on. So, there’s that.
“And then there’s just the fact that we have a lot of singles right now. I mean, 27 Top Tens is a lot. That means we can’t even play them all in one night, ’cause we usually average about 15 songs a night. So for us, I just think it’s time that we start honoring the music and the catalog and giving the fans what they wanna hear.”
I mean, plenty of bands are still putting out full albums and plenty of people still listen to them. I think it’s more that people aren’t buying Godsmack albums because, much like the people who still call Godsmack their favorite band, Godsmack pretty much peaked in 1998. But hey, all the people who are still stuck reliving their high school glory days will be super psyched to hear that “Voodoo” won’t get bumped out of Godsmack’s live sets.
