In a new interview, Godsmack frontman Sully Erna spoke about the band’s most recent release Lighting Up the Sky (released 2/24/23), and said it will likely be their last album of new material. When asked if they were working on anything new, Sully said:
“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.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t release singles but it seems unlikely. “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.”
When asked how he and his bandmates decided to make Lighting Up The Sky their final album, Sully said:
“It’s just what we feel at the moment. We tripped across this conversation. The more we thought about it, the more we were like… We’re starting to bum out a little bit live because there’s a lot more songs that we wanna play. And again, I’m not complaining. We’ve been very blessed to have a good career and a good run of Top 10 singles. We’re at, I think, 27 Top 10 singles with 13 Number Ones. So that means, I don’t know, if we get two or three off this record, we’re gonna be at 30 Top 10 singles. That means we could do 15 songs a night, play back-to-back nights in the same venue, and never play the same single twice, let alone the deep cuts. So we’re going, like, ‘Fuck, at what point do we honor the catalog and do what we want as fans when we go to see our favorite bands, like Aerosmith or Metallica, whatever? Are we really going to see their new record? Hmmm, no. I’m just being honest. I’m glad you put it out. I’m gonna check it out, but am I gonna love it as much as ‘Train Kept A-Rollin” and ‘Dream On’ and ‘Same Old Song And Dance’ and ‘Walk This Way’? No. That’s the shit I’m going to see. I wanna see it. Play those songs. Don’t spend 45 minutes playing your new record because that’s not the nostalgia of why you’ve been around for 40, 50 years.’
‘So we’re just trying to like set ourselves up to at least give our fans what I think they expect us to do. And with this many singles, we’re, like, man, how many more things are we gonna pile on our plate here before we can’t even get to all of them, which is now. And that’s kind of part of the reasoning behind it. So we were, like, ‘Yeah, maybe it’s the right time. Maybe we just go out and honor the catalog and go play live shows,’ which is what we love to do, what the people love to see us do. And, again, if we write some new music, we write some new music. I don’t know what’s gonna happen with that right now. But we do love playing shows, and that’s what we’re gonna do for now.”
