Category: SHINEDOWN

”Planet Zero” is the upcoming, seventh studio album by American rockers SHINEDOWN, set to be released on July 1, 2022. If you’re the sort that tends to ‘Shatter the glass when it’s half full’, then Shinedown are definitely seeing life through your lens. On the weirdly comforting track ‘Dysfunctional You’, this established and ever developing creative force are both flying the freak flag and saluting it. ‘I won’t be the ending that was written for me,’ frontman Brent Smith concludes on ‘Dead Don’t Die’, another song that finds strength in adversity.
”Planet Zero” was written during lockdown, a time when everything seemed to stop and people turned to screen-based comforts. This was a double-edged sword, as the band document capably on this seventh album.
Over two decades, Smith and co. have pushed the bounds just enough with each album, while still staying true to their Southern-influenced modern rock. At first glance, ”Planet Zero” looks incredibly weighty, with some 20 tracks. About a half dozen are short interludes. Regardless, the 14 full-length songs makes are expansive experience.
Between tracks, robot-voiced instructions leave us in no doubt that we are, or were, being asked to conform – but the music itself flies in the face of such stricture. It has medicinal, spirit-reviving properties. Comfort against the machine…

* It’s been almost ten years since Shinedown first appeared, ten years and eight million albums sold. Marketed in the same slot as Nickelback and Alter Bridge, personally I think they’re much more than the aforementioned bands, and much more than just ‘modern rock’. Their previous album was pretty good, but I think their new “Amaryllis” is superior in all...