In a recent interview with Australia's Heavy magazine, STONE TEMPLE PILOTS drummer Eric Kretz shared more information about the band's follow-up to their 2018 self-titled album, the first with new vocalist Jeff Gutt. The new effort is not expected to arrive before early 2020. "Yeah, it's an acoustic-ish record," he said (hear audio below). "I mean, it's not all acoustic. There's some electric guitars and some keyboards in there. It has strings in there and just some beautiful other instrumentation. It's something that we kind of delved on 25 years ago when we starting doing the [MTV] 'Unplugged' thing in New York. We just love being able to present songs in that genre, so we wanted to do not only just a few songs like that, but we said, 'Why don't we do a whole album so we can do a tour?' We're going to do about a three-week tour we're looking at for America. Being able to present the songs in just a different light and just try things a little different and maybe be able to play some material that we haven't been able to touch in 25 years or 20 years. Songs that I don't necessarily… songs that will be really fun to play maybe with some extra players onstage. We haven't worked it all out yet. You'll be hearing bits and pieces of the new record really soon." Kretz then went on to discuss what Gutt has brought to STONE TEMPLE PILOTS. The 43-year-old Michigan native beat out 15,000 other hopefuls for the vacant STP singer slot after an extended search that lasted for more than a year. "When we were auditioning singers, not only was his voice a mile wide when he first hit the first mic, but he was the only guy that every time we wrote a song on the spot, he could come up with a melody and lyrics for it," he said. "It was, like, 'Oh, man this is great!' It was very similar to what we had with [original vocalist] Scott [Weiland] in the early '90s where he could come up with ideas and start coming in with a melody right away and not say, 'Oh, I have to think about this for a few days before I even come up with a melody.' That's not the way we work. We work really fast. If someone has a riff, we all just jump in and change it sometimes, or sometimes we stick with it or turn it upside down, add some Tabasco to it and a little bit of spices and do our thing. Writing with Jeff was so important. We didn't want to do catalog. We wanted to be able to forge forward with new music. It just worked out great. I'm really happy with the 2018 self-titled and the new record. He's really, really shining on that one. He's the real deal." STONE TEMPLE PILOTS recently completed a co-headlining North American tour with RIVAL SONS. The trek kicked off in Baltimore on September 13, with stops in Philadelphia, New York City, New Orleans and more, before wrapping up in STONE TEMPLE PILOTS' former hometown of San Diego on October 9.
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