Credit: Johnny BuzzerioWhen Alice in Chains announced their summer tour dates last month, the band also revealed a new album was coming later this year. The news was a bit surprising, since the grunge vets had been tight-lipped about the potential follow-up to 2013’s The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, but guitarist Jerry Cantrell says the band wasn’t being purposefully withholding.
“It’s not that we were keeping it a secret — we just didn’t want to say a whole lot about it until we had something to say,” Cantrell tells Guitar World. “And we certainly have something to say with this one. It’s a f***ing strong record.”
As for what the album will sound like, though, Cantrell isn’t ready to reveal too much. However, he does say that it will mix new elements with the band’s signature sound.
“It’s a record we haven’t done yet, I can tell you that,” Cantrell explains. “But it’s also a record that has all the elements of anything you would expect from us. It’s got our fingerprint.”
He adds, “We’re really proud of the material that we wrote and the performances we captured. There’s some really heavy s***, some really ugly stuff, some real beautiful stuff, some weirdo trippy s***. It’s good!”
Cantrell estimates that the new album will arrive “sometime this summer.” In the meantime, Alice in Chains kicks off a U.S. tour April 28 in Boston.
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