SYMPHONY X will begin tracking their long-delayed tenth studio album next month, and Russell Allen is willing to put a year on the release for the first time.
Speaking with Mark Strigl on SiriusXM's Ozzy's Boneyard, the vocalist said the writing stage is finally behind them. "The new album is pretty close to starting to get recorded because the music is all there. Me and the guys, me and Mike Romeo, who is the genius, he is the maestro of the entire thing, he has tons of material. So the next step is we got all the lyrics. We got the concepts that we want to do and now we are going to start putting it together and the plan is to start in September."
Asked directly whether the record comes out in 2027, Allen did not qualify it. "Yes, for sure. It is just sitting right there." The band toured 11 Latin American countries earlier this year plus a couple of cruises, then went quiet for the summer. "I haven't spoken to Mike in a couple weeks," he said. "Took a hiatus — not as a band; just have not talked with each other in a bit. Just spending time with our families and enjoying the summer. This is the first summer I've kind of been home in awhile, having some barbecue. So, yeah. September it all starts all back up. I will be getting my stuff down within that time, within that window before I have to leave for TSO" — a reference to Allen's TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA commitments.
The wait since 2015's "Underworld" has a specific cause, and Romeo has explained it plainly. Album royalties dried up, touring became the income, and touring kept severing his writing.
"I'd come up with a handful of ideas," he told Brazil's 92.5 Kiss FM in March. "And I go on tour and I stop. Go on tour… I come home. More ideas. I didn't finish the ones from last time, so now repeat that, like, 20 times. And then I'm looking at a folder of ideas that's got 1,037 ideas. And I'm trying to sort it out, and I'm sending it to the guys. I'm, like, 'Guys, I've just got so much stuff. What's the good stuff?' And their heads probably blew up."
Allen put the same problem in blunter terms: Romeo sent him "10 hours of stuff for a 55-minute record. It becomes a monumental task just to weed through all the stuff."
Romeo's own diagnosis is not writer's block but its opposite. "It's not like we don't have anything — we actually have too much. But the problem is we don't have too much finished things. We have a billion things that are not finished yet… And then I painted myself in a corner." His stated target was to have the album recorded by the end of this year.
The core lineup remains Allen on vocals, Romeo on guitar, Michael Pinnella on keyboards and Mike LePond on bass.
Source: blabbermouth.net