Seether Confronts ‘Genuine Anguish’ on ‘The Surface Seems So Far’

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 fashioned Seether, as Saron Gasoline, in his native South Africa (bassist Dale Stewart joined in January of 2000 and has remained since). Through the interim the group has launched 9 studio albums and netted 26 prime 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 Music” 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 already know you’ve been doing it for awhile.

“I assume for us essentially the most thrilling factor remains to be to have the ability to do it…at this degree and with this sort of enthusiasm and this sort of fan base. Fortunately to date we’ve managed to maintain on trucking and hold the band transferring ahead. That in itself, I feel, is the achievement I concentrate on.

“I’ve toured many, a few years with many, many bands that now not exist, and so they had been bands I assumed had been higher than us. We’ve actually weathered some genres and developments and seen some go and return, and we’ve simply kind of been trucking away within the background. By some means we’ve managed to maintain ourselves round and be related on some degree.”

Seether’s persevering with reference to its viewers isn’t laborious to determine. The music stays a type of timeless, high-powered model of heavy rock, steeped in well-established traditions of traditional grunge, metallic and, often, punk. As a lyricist, in the meantime, Morgan wears his proverbial coronary heart on his sleeve, unafraid to mine darkish feelings all the way in which again to early favorites akin to “Nice 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 hearken 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 means of conditions, or darker days I assume. I try to at all times characterize the music and myself in an trustworthy and possible way and be as weak as I can with out being attempting to offer 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 perhaps get one thing out of it that means.

“So all of that mixed would contribute perhaps, to the very fact we’re nonetheless right here.”

Followers seemingly received’t have bother regarding the 11 tracks on The Floor Appears So Far, both.

Written throughout an 18-month interval throughout which Morgan’s spouse gave start to their third youngster, the songs stem from “a variety of existential disaster moments” he was experiencing through the 2020 pandemic lockdown, which got here just some 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 vital particular person and my livelihood was not vital for a really very long time.” And whereas he wasn’t sorry that “I received to take a seat 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 search out one thing else I wish to do for the remainder of my life, the place I really feel extra fulfilled and perhaps don’t really feel fairly so expendable?’ There have been many occasions I thought of quitting, yeah.

“These had been the most important points for me in scripting this album.”

These heavy questions will be felt all through The Floor Appears So Far as Seether — Morgan, Stewart drummer John Humphrey and guitarist Corey Lowery — steam by means of the leaden dynamics of songs akin to “Attempt to Heal,” “Identical 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 executed that doesn’t have an acoustic (observe) on it, which I didn’t understand till we had been executed,” 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 kind of a fishing expedition; I don’t know what I’m doing and I’ve no route, so I simply begin writing and the route reveals itself to me.

“And essentially the most highly effective feelings of the previous few years for me had been actually rage and anger, and on this explicit snapshot of my life most of it was, ‘I must eliminate 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 constructive and I realized 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 realized sufficient about songwriting from him. I’ve realized sufficient about producing from him, the strategy of creating an album from him, and I’ve realized from the both guys what I DON’T wish 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 happy 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 type of be in an identical vein and have an identical type of theme or an identical type of sound, and when the following album comes it’s gonna be a model new chapter…and perhaps have anyone 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, working 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 might be recent, after all, however Morgan predicts that “‘Judas Thoughts’ will certainly be within the set record, and I would wish to play ‘Phantasm’ ’trigger it’s one among my favourite songs on the album and is on the streaming platforms, so folks can understand it. You do wish to play the songs that followers are there to see, proper? So I do wish to play all of the classics, so to talk, and as soon as the album’s been out a bit of longer we will begin to play extra of these songs and get a really feel about these from the viewers.

“We’re simply blissful 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.”