Back in April, Godsmack frontman Sully Erna revealed that the band's upcoming album could potentially be their final one. Turns out it definitely is. In an interview with Pablo of 93X, Erna said the new album is a recounting of his entire life and confirmed the record is "the last record we're ever gonna do."
"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."
Later in the same interview, Erna made it clear that Godsmack doesn't intend to break up after releasing the album or anything like that. Instead, Erna notes that Godsmack will continue touring for a little while and capitalize on their past hits. Which makes sense – Godsmack is turning into a legacy act as many other very successful bands have done over the years.
And much like every other band that says they're done for good or the next album is the final album, Erna throws in the usual "unless it isn't" comment right at the end of what he's saying. Which again, makes perfect sense in that he's saying all this now, but who knows how he and the band will feel X-number of years down the line.
"I wanna make sure people are clear about what we're saying here," he said. "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."
Godsmack has not yet announced their new record, but did release the new single "Surrender" on September 28.
