Sermo Lupi
SS.org Regular
I was surprised to see we don't have a Symphony X megathread on the forum yet. With another album forthcoming and several side projects soon to be released, now seemed as good a time as any to start one.
New Symphony X Album
There's still no release date for the upcoming album, but several members of the band made statements in mid-2019 and throughout 2020, providing various updates. These updates were then effectively deferred a year once it was obvious the pandemic wasn't going away in 2021. Russell Allen addressed the subject at length in a podcast from June 2021 (quoted below), basically saying that the band wants to do a 25th anniversary tour before releasing the new album. Reading between the lines, I suspect Michael Romeo probably has most of the material composed at this point, but the band has only just started to sit down to rough it out in order to record and polish it into an album.
I'd guess we won't see the new album until late 2022 or early 2023 at the soonest.
Some relevant quotes about the band's progress:
Side Projects (2015-2020)
Since the release of Underworld in 2015, here's what the band has been up to:
Michael Romeo:
New Symphony X Album
There's still no release date for the upcoming album, but several members of the band made statements in mid-2019 and throughout 2020, providing various updates. These updates were then effectively deferred a year once it was obvious the pandemic wasn't going away in 2021. Russell Allen addressed the subject at length in a podcast from June 2021 (quoted below), basically saying that the band wants to do a 25th anniversary tour before releasing the new album. Reading between the lines, I suspect Michael Romeo probably has most of the material composed at this point, but the band has only just started to sit down to rough it out in order to record and polish it into an album.
I'd guess we won't see the new album until late 2022 or early 2023 at the soonest.
Some relevant quotes about the band's progress:
- June 2019, Michael Romeo: "It just seemed like we just needed a little time for everybody to regroup and do their own things. That's why we decided to do this [2019 tour]...we just said, 'Instead of working on a record, let's just go out and tour a little bit. Let's get everybody back together, back on the [same] page and have some fun.' That's what we're doing here. As far as a record, after we get back, we have another run in South America in July and August, but once we get back to the States in the fall, we're going to talk about a record and what we're going to do. Usually, we'll just sit around and come up with some ideas — what's it going to be about — but once that happens, it's pretty quick…I think it's just going to naturally go where it goes."
- May 2020, Mike LePond: "Well, what we decided is as soon as the virus thing kind of slows down a little bit, we're gonna get together and write a new record. We've told [our record label] Nuclear Blast that we're ready to start writing, so they know. So the wheels are gonna start, I would say, within about a month or so [in June 2020]"
- Sept 2020, Mike LePond: "We were planning to do some tours in 2020 and then we got hit with the virus, so we put all our plans on hold. We moved the touring to 2021. As far as the new album, I think as soon as the virus stuff goes away, I think we'll start getting together and writing songs."
- June 2021, Russell Allen: "We were supposed to do this 25-year Anniversary Tour back in 2020, so we still want to do that. We've been working on material now, but we still want to do that run. I mean, all the booking agents, they're like, 'there's no loss here in terms of the public interest, and the fans want to see you. So just do this run, and then get your record out [afterward]'...So that's what we're thinking, and I think it's a good way to go. We can follow that up immediately with the material we've been working on for the new record and everyone's going to be into it, and that's going to be great for Symphony X. But I don't want to sit around--and I know Mike [Romeo] doesn't either--trying to get a new record done [when] everything opens back up again. Because that's when all the excitement is there! And we want to be a part of that excitement. We had already planned to be out there [in 2020, doing the 25th Anniversary Tour], so we might as well just go out there and do that, and that's what we're planning on doing."
Side Projects (2015-2020)
Since the release of Underworld in 2015, here's what the band has been up to:
Michael Romeo:
- 2018 - War of the Worlds Part 1, the first part of his second full-length solo album. Second part is forthcoming in 2022.
- 2015-2020 - Guest solos/guitars/orchestration on Mike Lepond's Silent Assassins' Pawn and Prophesy and Whore of Babylon, DGM's The Passage, DiAmorte's The Red Opera, Mari Hamada's Gracia, and Verni's Barricade.
- 2015 - Level 10, Chapter One, a full-length album from the band Level 10, which Allen co-founded a few years earlier.
- 2015 - Adrenaline Mob, Dearly Departed, an EP of cover songs.
- 2017 - Adrenaline Mob, We the People, a full-length (and likely the final) album from Adrenaline Mob.
- 2020 - Allen/Olzen, Worlds Apart, a full-length album with ex-Nightwish vocalist Annette Olzen.
- 2015-2020: Guest vocals on Ayreon's The Source, Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Letters from the Labyrinth, and Magni Animi Viri's Heroes Temporis.
- 2018 - Mike LePond's Silent Assassins, Pawn and Prophesy
- 2020 - Mike LePond's Silent Assassins, Whore of Babylon
- 2015-Present: a million different sessions and/or side projects with bands Affector, Burnt City, Dead Risen, Death Dealer, Everdawn, Ross the Boss, Two Hundred Feet, Ureas, Waken Eyes, Elegacy, Eternity's End, Them, Aldaria, Annysia, Anuryzm, Burning Witches, DiAmorte, Enbound, Exxiles, Icy Steel, Karma, Lalu, Maegi, Marius Danielsen, Mentalist, Midnight Eternal, MindMaze, Mr Ego, Myrkgand, Obsidian, Painters of Ether, Silvertrain, Tommorrow's Eve, Tony Gabriel's Orbynot, Universal Mind Project, and Vivaldi Metal Project.
- 2018 - Mike LePond's Silent Assassins, Pawn and Prophesy
- 2020 - Mike LePond's Silent Assassins, Whore of Babylon
- 2015-Present: Session work for Dark Sky Choir
- 2020 - 3 Rules, Rule of 3, a full-length from a genre-crossing side project that reminds of the extreme progressive metal band, Octopus, if anyone is familiar.
- 2022 - War of the World's Part 2. Only a 30 second teaser clip has been released so far, linked below.
- 2022 - Star One, Revel in Time. Michael Romeo has contributed a solo to the new Star One album, which previously had been a collaboration between Arjen Lucassen and Russell Allen. That makes me think Russell Allen may also be announced as a guest vocalist in due course, but nothing on that as of yet. The solo and the full single are linked below.