STRYPER's eighteenth album, "Throne Of Thorns", arrives September 25 on Frontiers Music Srl. Michael Sweet is already planning the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first — and he wants to record all three in one go.
Talking to Lots Of Muzik, the guitarist and vocalist of the Christian metal pioneers laid out the plan: "That's what we're talking about doing. We're trying to work out all the details right now. But if it works out, we're gonna go in the studio in January and track three albums' worth of music. So the reason being is to reach that 21-album goal. This one's number 18, so three more would be 21."
The arithmetic is the easy part. The reason behind it is not. Sweet is being treated for papillary thyroid cancer, diagnosed last autumn less than a month after a biopsy of a nodule in the right lobe of his thyroid; he had part of the left side removed in December 2023 and has been open with fans about what the condition has done to his voice. STRYPER guitarist Oz Fox has been dealing with brain tumours since a seizure onstage in 2018 revealed two of them, and has had repeated surgery since, missing the band's 2024 acoustic tour.
So Sweet went to the label with a proposition that sounds less like ambition than triage.
"I suggested to the label, like, 'Get us while you can.' Get us at this stage of our lives while we can still perform at this level, because in a year or two or four, we might not be able to — Oz or me. I don't know. It's possible," he said. "For example, if I have to have another surgery, the doctor said it's more high risk, in terms of damage to the vocal cords, my vocal folds. So, there's always the what-ifs. If I have to have that and I can't sing or whatever — I mean, granted, I put my faith in God, but things happen. That's reality."
Frontiers, by his account, needed a minute. "They didn't know what to think at first. They were a little thrown off by it and thought, 'Well, okay, this is interesting. Wow.' And then by the end of the meeting, they really liked the idea. They thought it was a great idea, and I do too. I think more bands might wanna take note and try it as well."
The releases would still come out on a normal schedule, spaced years apart. The point is that they would exist. "They would be done, and we wouldn't be concerned about, in four years or five years, if Oz can play or if I can sing or if Perry [Richardson, bassist] is gonna retire or if Robert [Sweet, drummer]… You know what I mean? All these things."
Papillary thyroid cancer accounts for roughly 80 percent of thyroid cancer cases and has the best prognosis of the group; most patients are curable when treated early.