For Seether frontman Shaun Morgan, it’s extra thrilling to be bringing out a brand new album — The Floor Appears So Far, which drops Friday, Sept. 20 — than it’s to be celebrating the band’s twenty fifth anniversary.
It has been that lengthy since Morgan shaped Seether, as Saron Fuel, in his native South Africa (bassist Dale Stewart joined in January of 2000 and has remained since). In the course of the interim the group has launched 9 studio albums and netted 26 high 10 singles on Billboard’s varied rock charts, together with 10 No. 1 Mainstream Rock Airplay hits with the brand new album’s first single, “Judas Thoughts.” Seether was additionally Billboard’s No. 1 Energetic Rock Artist and Heritage Rock Artist in 2011, the identical yr “Nation Tune” was the highest Energetic Rock track of the yr.
“Generally it seems like 25 minutes, generally it seems like 250 years,” Morgan tells Billboard by way of Zoom from his residence in Nashville — the place, he acknowledges with a chuckle, “I’m 45 now, so it’s been a very long time and I’m beginning to really feel it within the bones, all of the respective illnesses that slowly creep in with age. There’s at all times that actuality verify to let you realize you’ve been doing it for awhile.
“I suppose for us probably the most thrilling factor continues to be to have the ability to do it…at this degree and with this type of enthusiasm and this type of fan base. Fortunately up to now we’ve managed to maintain on trucking and hold the band shifting ahead. That in itself, I feel, is the achievement I give attention to.
“I’ve toured many, a few years with many, many bands that not exist, and so they have been bands I assumed have been higher than us. We’ve actually weathered some genres and developments and seen some go and return, and we’ve simply type of been trucking away within the background. Someway we’ve managed to maintain ourselves round and be related on some degree.”
Seether’s persevering with reference to its viewers isn’t arduous to determine. The music stays a sort of timeless, high-powered model of heavy rock, steeped in well-established traditions of traditional grunge, metallic and, sometimes, punk. As a lyricist, in the meantime, Morgan wears his proverbial coronary heart on his sleeve, unafraid to mine darkish feelings all the best way again to early favorites resembling “Superb Once more,” “Gasoline” and “Damaged,” the worldwide breakthrough single when it was re-recorded with Evanescence’s Amy Lee for 2004’s Disclaimer II album.
“I simply attempt to write what I wish to take heed to and what I wish to play and what makes me really feel one thing on an emotional degree,” Morgan explains. “I don’t attempt to overthink it; I simply write what I’m feeling each time we do an album and try to write music that helps me get by conditions, or darker days I suppose. I try to at all times signify the music and myself in an trustworthy and possible way and be as weak as I can with out being attempting to provide away an excessive amount of. I try to be as imprecise as I can, lyrically, so folks can apply the songs to how they’re feeling and possibly get one thing out of it that means.
“So all of that mixed would contribute possibly, to the actual fact we’re nonetheless right here.”
Followers doubtless gained’t have bother referring to the 11 tracks on The Floor Appears So Far, both.
Written throughout an 18-month interval throughout which Morgan’s spouse gave beginning to their third baby, the songs stem from “quite a lot of existential disaster moments” he was experiencing in the course of the 2020 pandemic lockdown, which got here only a few months earlier than the discharge of Seether’s final album, Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum.
“Clearly 2020 was a wash, and 2021 and ’22 weren’t significantly better,” Morgan explains. “I’d been advised by the powers that be that I used to be not a related or necessary individual and my livelihood was not necessary for a really very long time.” And whereas he wasn’t sorry that “I received to sit down and be with household and actually get pleasure from being a dad and a husband,” Morgan additionally confronted “moments of self-doubt and the real anguish of questioning, ‘OK, what’s subsequent? Is that this all that there’s? Do I’ve to seek out one thing else I need to do for the remainder of my life, the place I really feel extra fulfilled and possibly don’t really feel fairly so expendable?’ There have been many occasions I thought of quitting, yeah.
“These have been the most important points for me in scripting this album.”
These heavy questions might be felt all through The Floor Appears So Far as Seether — Morgan, Stewart drummer John Humphrey and guitarist Corey Lowery — steam by the leaden dynamics of songs resembling “Attempt to Heal,” “Similar Errors,” “Semblance of Me,” “Paint the World,” “Lifeless on the Vine” and “Phantasm,” whereas “Partitions Come Down” stands out as a extra melodic counterweight.
“It’s humorous; that is the primary album we’ve carried out that doesn’t have an acoustic (monitor) on it, which I didn’t understand till we have been carried out,” Morgan notes. “I wrote about 20 songs and we ended up recording about 13 of them. However there was by no means actually a thought of what I needed it to sound like. At any time when I begin writing for albums it’s type of a fishing expedition; I don’t know what I’m doing and I’ve no path, so I simply begin writing and the path reveals itself to me.
“And probably the most highly effective feelings of the previous few years for me have been actually rage and anger, and on this specific snapshot of my life most of it was, ‘I must do away with this frustration and this anger,’ and that results in heavier music, clearly.”
The Floor Appears So Far marks Morgan’s third consecutive album as producer, too, a activity he first discovered “daunting” however that he’s grown extra snug with over time. “There’s just one producer I labored with who I felt the expertise was optimistic and I discovered one thing from, and that was Brendan O’Brien,” who produced Holding Onto Strings Higher Left to Fray in 2011 and 2014’s Isolate and Medicate. Morgan explains that, “I got here out the opposite facet of these albums with him and thought, ‘OK, I’ve discovered sufficient about songwriting from him. I’ve discovered sufficient about producing from him, the method of creating an album from him, and I’ve discovered from the both guys what I DON’T need to do, so lemme give it a shot and see the way it works out.’ And due to that these previous three albums are literally the primary time a excessive share of me is pleased with how they sound.”
That mentioned, Morgan doesn’t rule out working with another person sooner or later.
“I’m not against it,” he says. “I at all times had in my thoughts there can be this trio of albums I’d produce, and so they’d all sort of be in an analogous vein and have an analogous sort of theme or an analogous sort of sound, and when the following album comes it’s gonna be a model new chapter…and possibly have someone else are available in and provides me an opinion once more from an outsider’s perspective. We’ll see.”
For now Morgan and Seether are excited to be getting again on the street. Dates have simply began with Skillet, operating into October with some competition stops (Louder Than Life in Louisville, Rocktoberfest in Oceanside, Calif. and Aftershock in Sacramento) and extra forward for 2025. The brand new album can be contemporary, after all, however Morgan predicts that “‘Judas Thoughts’ will certainly be within the set checklist, and I would need to play ‘Phantasm’ ’trigger it’s one among my favourite songs on the album and is on the streaming platforms, so folks can comprehend it. You do need to play the songs that followers are there to see, proper? So I do need to play all of the classics, so to talk, and as soon as the album’s been out somewhat longer we are able to begin to play extra of these songs and get a really feel about these from the viewers.
“We’re simply pleased to be getting again on the street, man. We’re a touring band, and we haven’t been capable of do as a lot in the previous few years, so we’re actually prepared for this now.”