Progressive metal veterans Symphony X say their long-awaited new album is finally starting to come together after years of writing sessions and touring delays.
Speaking in a new interview with Brazil’s 92.5 Kiss FM, guitarist and primary songwriter Michael Romeo discussed the slow but steady progress on the follow-up to the band’s 2015 album Underworld.
Romeo explained that the band’s creative process has changed drastically since the early days, when album royalties allowed them to spend extended stretches focusing solely on writing and recording.
“In the old days, years ago, working on a record, we were getting royalties from the albums,” Romeo said. “So there was a little money coming in, and we were okay. We survived. And when it came time to writing a record, I could come down in the studio for as long as it took — a year… And we could kind of get the record done and just concentrate on the record a hundred percent.”
According to Romeo, the biggest obstacle hasn’t been a lack of material — it’s the opposite: “To be honest, dude, the honest truth is that after COVID, we started playing a lot just to kind of get everybody back on their feet and get some money coming in,” he explained. “And then it was, like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna start working on riffs.'”
However, repeated tour cycles interrupted his workflow, leaving him with a massive backlog of unfinished ideas.
“I come home, more ideas. I didn’t finish the ones from last time, so now repeat that like 20 times,” Romeo said. “And then I’m looking at a folder of ideas that’s got 1,037 ideas. And I’m trying to sort it out, and I’m sending it to the guys. I’m like, ‘Guys, I’ve just got so much stuff. What’s the good stuff?'”
Romeo hopes the band can finally lock in a recording schedule this year: “The schedule we’re trying to get on is by the end of this year, let’s have this thing recorded,” he said. “Because it’s not like we don’t have anything — we actually have too much. But the problem is we don’t have too much finished things.”
Frontman Russell Allen echoed that sentiment in a recent interview with Uruguay’s The Dark Melody, revealing that Romeo has already sent him roughly 10 hours of material for what will likely be a 55-minute album.
“It becomes a monumental task just to weed through all the stuff,” Allen said. “But he’s honed a lot of it in, so we’re getting close.”
While the gap between albums has stretched to more than a decade, Allen insists the band prioritizes quality over speed: “I’m not gonna apologize to you guys for taking the time,” he said. “It’s just how we create this stuff… At the end of the day, we’ve gotta live with it.”
Still, he suggested the massive backlog of material could shorten the wait for the next record after this one: “There’s so much good material… There shouldn’t be as much of a gap,” Allen said. “But I’m not gonna make any promises.”
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