Music

Alice in Chains say "plenty of riffs flying around" for new album

by Ciaran Thompson

Speaking with Billboard recently ahead of their BlackDiamondSkye tour with Deftones and Mastadon, Alice in Chains singer/ guitarist William DuVall has said he’s pretty sure the band will be recording another album in the near future. Black Gives Way to Blue, the band’s first album in 14 years and first with DuVall behind the mic instead of the deceased Layne Stayley, was released last year.

“It would be fairly safe to say that you don’t come this far and do all this work just to stop for another 15 years,” DuVall said. “We are on a path, and just as it was at the beginning, we still don’t know where it’s going to lead. We’re digging what we’re doing and we’re very happy with the reception we’ve gotten, and we respect the fact that this was a tall order to write in the first place, and to fill it is an even bigger deal. So I have a hard time imagining we would go through the ride we’ve been on the last four, five years just to stop.

“We’re excited about the future,” DuVall added. “Let’s just say that.”

The hefty touring schedule behind the band’s last album has left the quartet with plenty of time to work on new material during sound checks and DuVall said “there’s plenty of riffs flying around,” which could be used to a new record.

“That was the case when we first started back up,” he said. “We would just stockpile these fragments, and then some time later we would sift through the mountain of stuff, and that’s what became Black Gives Way to Blue. The same thing has been happening since we’ve been touring…so it would be only natural to at some point say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a lot of stuff. Let’s sift through and see what we’ve got this time.'”

The BlackDiamonSkye tour has two remaining Canadian dates in Toronto at the Molson Amphitheatre on September 18 and at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena on October 7.