The world has completely changed since Shinedown's most recent record Attention Attention came out in 2018. With the follow-up nearly finished, frontman Brent Smith has described the new album as "controversial" and "provocative."

"We wanted to push everything to the front. And what I mean by that is, we've proven that we can make these records that there's a lot of musicianship involved in it, and we have layered our records over the years because we love music and we love sound and we love big, epic... we try to make really cinematic records," Smith explained to New Jersey's 95.9 The Rat.

Therefore, Shinedown have experimented with things other than simple instrumentation, such as orchestration and synthesizers in the past in order to create these epic albums. But this time around, they wanted to keep it more raw.

"So the majority of this record is authentically drums, bass, guitar. There are piano songs — there's two really, really very intense-subject-matter piano songs that are gonna be in Shinedown seven," the singer continued.

"But we wanted to make a real rock record, we wanted to make a real record where we focus on just making sure that the band is being heard the way the band needs to be heard. So, not a lot of layering. It doesn't mean it's any less powerful, it's just we're not dealing with a lot of stacks."

As far as the lyrical content, Smith described the upcoming album as a "very humanitarian record" because a lot of it was written during 2020 and 2021 — two years that have changed the entire world, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the various circumstances that have surrounded it.

"We're opening up the conversation into different subject matters that Shinedown has never addressed," he admitted. "But it's a record that I think some people will consider controversial, I think some people will consider to be very provocative, especially for Shinedown, but it's also something that we feel that it is very important and that it is necessary."

The first single from Shinedown's upcoming seventh studio album is expected to come out next month. See the clips from the interview below.

Brent Smith Describes New Shinedown Album as 'Controversial'

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