Metal Anarchy

Apocalyptica have revealed that they are working on a new album. The conceptual effort is expected to be released in 2024.

Eicca Toppinen told Backstage TV the following:

“There’s always new music. Years ago, when we preparing for the ‘Cell-0’ album, we kind of realized that, ‘Okay, this modern streaming world gives us the possibility to do different things at the same time.’ That’s why we made ‘Cell-0’ a fully instrumental album because we knew, okay, we like to do vocal collaborations as well, but we don’t need to squeeze everything in the same package. That’s why we’ve been releasing constantly just individual songs. Since ‘Cell-0’, we released ‘White Room’ with Jacoby Shaddix [of PAPA ROACH], we released ‘Talk To Me’ [with Lzzy Hale of HALESTORM], we did a classical EP of [Maurice] Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ stuff. And now the latest release is ‘Rise Again’ with Simone Simons [EPICA]. And we are working on another vocal song now with a European female singer. Hopefully it will come out in the summer. And then we also start to record a new album in May. It will be out sometime late next year. Because we are constantly on tour, so we are doing the album in between the tours in a couple of different periods. I can’t reveal the concept yet, but it’s gonna be a concept album. And it’s gonna be interesting. It’s been exciting to kind of prepare the material for it. But we are constantly [putting out new music]; let’s say there’s four releases every year.”

He also added the following about the band’s songwriting process:

“I’ve written most of the original music, and Perttu [Kivilaakso] has done a lot, and Mikko [Sirén] has done a few great songs as well. So it differs a little bit. I’ve done a lot of co-writing, especially when we’re working on songs with vocals. I’ve been teaming up with some really good songwriters, like the top writers and stuff, to get the best result out of the music written.

Usually when we do original music, pretty much whoever writes the music is doing it pretty far. Of course we do the final arrangement together, but it’s a pretty independent process. But now, for example, we’ve been working on some arrangements and that kind of stuff, and that’s something that we operate usually more as a band together. So it varies. There’s no general rule, how to do things. And that’s actually a thing that we want to break the rules all the time, because the essence of APOCALYPTICA and the main reason why we still exist is that we are searching all the time something new — new ways to do music; not to stay in our comfort zone; not to do only what we know already… And that’s why there’s no formula for, basically, anything. So that kind of keeps the creativity alive and keeps making new music exciting for us.”

[via Blabbermouth]