Tommy Shaw said Styx were progressing well with writing a new album, though he didn’t say if there was a prospective release date.

The completed project will be their 17th studio LP, following 2017’s The Mission, which came 14 years after the band's previous record, Cyclorama.

“We’re pretty well into it,” Shaw told PodKats! “[Singer] Lawrence [Gowan] will be coming to Nashville, and our producer, Will Evankovich ... we’re going to be doing the writing demos for the songs that we have so far, and finishing up a few things. Mainly now it's just a matter of scheduling between times that we're on the road and times that we need to be home. That's the hardest thing – just getting us all together in a room.”

Looking back at their return to the studio for The Mission, Shaw noted "there was a time when it seemed like there wouldn't be a place or an opportunity to have new music, but the new music kept coming. The Mission was like a storm of ideas that just all stuck together one after another, and you just had to get out of the way and let it come down and record it. It so wanted to be created. It was amazing.”

Last year, Styx bassist Ricky Phillips said The Mission had come after a period of doubt over the value of making any more albums. “We had witnessed people putting out records that we thought were good … and they were kind of going nowhere,” he said. “Back in the day, if you didn't sell, what's a gold record, 500,000? -- and anything less than that was really a failure. Well, now, you'd be lucky to sell 50,000. And so we thought, ‘What's the point? It's gonna cost a lot of money.’ ... [But] we're still songwriters, so we've all been collecting all these ideas over the years.”

 

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