Metal Anarchy

During a recent interview with the Rock Interview Series, Drowning Pool guitarist C.J. Pierce discussed the band’s current plans. Among them are a new album for 2025 and a “Sinner” 25th anniversary tour for 2026.

Pierce said the following about new music:

“It’s been great to write with Ryan McCombs again. It’s been two years now. I can’t believe it’s been two years since we’ve been rocking out [with Ryan back in the band]. It was gonna be a couple of reunion shows. We had a big show with PANTERA May 5th two years ago. And that was like the thing that was, like, ‘Yeah, let’s bring Ryan back in.’ And next thing you know, man, everyone’s calling. They want us to play shows and do tours.

We’ve been writing a lot of new songs together. It’s just the fact that we’ve been touring so much, we haven’t had that much time to get it together. So, we did put out ‘Revolution’ first, and then we didn’t wanna make people wait too much longer, so we put out ‘Madness’ now. But what I’m doing now, I’m home from tour and these next couple of weeks I’m gonna finish putting together all the songs that we have and try to get everything else done so we can get a record out there before the end of the summer. It’s kind of the goal right now — loosely based goal because life is life and things happen, but I actually have a block of time for the first time in two years to put together all the awesome ideas we’ve been all working on together as a band.”

He continued when asked about a record label:

“It’s SBG Records, [founded by] Shan Horan. It’s an independent label. We’ve been slowly working towards being independent. We are self-managed. Each one of us in the band take on a different role. And you’ve gotta take a hold of your career, man. A lot of stuff happened before COVID. I know COVID messed up a lot of stuff for a lot of bands and people, and us coming out of it, we just had to clean house and take control of our career, man. So it’s been great, dude. It’s been so awesome working with Shan, SBG, just everybody that’s in our corner. We have a great team of people that we put together ourselves versus doing the label route. Again, SBG [is an] independent label, but we outsource all the pieces [and] parts to make it happen.

There’s different facets, major labels, independent labels and what they all entail in house and stuff like that. We’ve just been on major labels. The last one was Universal. And all the stuff, all the pieces and parts you need are in-house, but you never know how much love you’re gonna get or not get within it.

I hate talking business, man, because it’s all about the rock and roll and music, but since we are independently managed, business is on our brain. You have to keep an eye on it as well, if you wanna get your music out there and your art out there. And that’s all we wanna do, man — we wanna get our new music out there, we wanna put on shows and hang out with the fans and have a great time. That’s exactly what we’ve been doing, and more of it so much so, because we’re running the show now. So it’s been great, dude, in partnership with Shan with SBG. They’ve been awesome. So, we finally have the right mix of people working with us.”

He also added the following about celebrating “Sinner”:

“We definitely wanna start [touring] here in the States and do all next year, promoting a lot of that. And hats off to [late DROWNING POOL singer] Dave Williams and do him right and do a lot of things that we haven’t done that fans haven’t heard. We have a lot of stuff we’re putting together for the package and a lot of material that we still have with Dave Williams — and, again, respect to him — to get to the hardcore fans that like to hear it, just all that stuff out. So we’re putting that together now. The solid plans haven’t been laid out yet, but we will be doing the anniversary tour next year in the States, and then probably the following year go back to Europe and do it there as well.”

He went on to say that the album will be performed in full:

“We’re definitely gonna be doing that, and then more songs on top of that. The last song that we wrote with Dave was a song called ‘Heroes Sleeping’. We’ve been talking about playing that live. We have a song called ‘Break You’, that song on ‘The Scorpion King’ soundtrack and stuff. So there’s different things. We did [a cover of] ‘The Game’ for Triple H, MOTÖRHEAD’s ‘The Game’, and it’s something else we hadn’t played live. So things like that that we haven’t been able to do, all Dave Williams-oriented.

I’ve been going through storage lately and there’s a bunch of songs that we have that were finished demo-wise, but we never like got to like record ’em for real. So I have a lot more material than I thought I had. So it’s also gonna be fun to get out… We’re gonna go through — Mike, Steve and myself — and pick out some choice songs that we think would be worthy to get out to the hardcore fans and maybe even possibly play those live. So, again, this is my dream list of what I’d like to do. We’re gonna get together as a band, and we’ll see all what works best for us for the tour.”

[via Blabbermouth]