25 years since Brent Smith first set the wheels rolling on Shinedown, it seems the Florida rockers are finally getting their flowers. With festival headlines and millions of album sales long ago in the bag, recognition as one of the foremost bands of their generation could feel overdue. Instead, new album EI8HT finds Brent and the boys focused on giving back to the very fans who got them here...
Video may have killed the radio star, but years later, even in a world of TikTok, YouTube and countless platforms for curated streaming, Brent Smith feels most at home on the old-fashioned airwaves.
Kicking around his parents’ house as a kid in Knoxville, Tennessee, the Shinedown man remembers the grainy murmur of local station WOKI 98.7-FM emanating everywhere, playing a range of artists from Poison to Whitney Houston. Detroit disc jockey Casey Kasem was a defining voice from his childhood, charting the flow of popular music as host of the American Top 40, then New York maverick Howard Stern changed the game as K-Rock’s prototypical ‘shock jock’ narrowing focus on heavier sounds. Brent is even nerdy about the mechanism of radio broadcast itself, enthusing about how the handful of antennas in European countries compares to the thousands Stateside.
“If the grid goes down in a nuclear attack or tsunami, the last line of defence is the radio tower,” he grins, with striking zeal. “Shinedown [started in] Jacksonville, Florida, so we know all about hurricanes. The radio has saved our lives many times. They did a poll on radio listenership in North America at the end of last year, too. Alternative and active rock stations – newer music, as opposed to ‘classic rock’ – had an up-tick in listeners aged 18-25 of something like 15 to 20 per cent. Those kids are out in their cars more, just driving around with the radio on. They don’t necessarily want music that’s curated for them [by some algorithm], they like listening to an actual human DJ.”
As much as Brent loves radio, radio might love Shinedown even more. Moving to the sunshine state 25 years ago to begin again following the end of previous outfit Dreve, the talented young vocalist had big ideas that U.S. media powerhouses like Rolling Stone and MTV would gravitate to his new band. But right from breakout 2003 single Fly From The Inside, it was the big radio stations who really welcomed them in. Between that moment and this, Shinedown have gone on to take the record for the most Number One hits in the history of American Mainstream Rock Airplay, with current single Safe And Sound moving that number to 25. But now that they’ve started to to bridge across the traditional modern and classic rock divide, is there existential anxiety about getting old?
“Are you kidding me?” he laughs. “I think it’s awesome. We’re the only artist on Atlantic Records currently currently being played in six formats. Radio gave us our career. It continues to do that!”
Eating up almost a full quarter of our hour-long interview with anecdotes about and analysis of a broadcast form many of his peers would consider outmoded is wonderfully on-brand for Brent. An unaffected personality unwilling to discard reliable old ways simply for the sake of chasing some concept of cutting edge, his honest-to-goodness old-school mindset is apparent in everything from the common courtesy with which he meets passers-by to the hearty meat-and-potatoes of his music. Where snooty critics dismiss ‘radio rock’ as lowest-common-denominator junk food for the undiscerning masses, he approaches the art of writing a boot-down banger or a power ballad ready to rip the roofs off arenas with the same respectful craftsmanship as a blacksmith carrying on centuries old business.
The fact that Shinedown have racked up over 10 million album sales, and classics like ...Sound Of Madness or 45 have amassed hundreds of millions of streams is proof there’s no need to fix what ain’t broken. He’s even honestly averse to being dragged into the destructive culture wars that seem to have dominated the discourse in modern America, refusing to identify as ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’, preferring just to call himself an American. When he has openly suggested that the Oval Office be shared by representatives from both sides of the political divide, it is no kind of apolitical cop-out. Rather it’s a deceptively intelligent understanding that partisan politics lead only to more entrenched division. The only way back is compromise.
“We want to remind people not just of the power of music, but the power of communication,” he shrugs. “Human beings need to not stop talking to each other, to never stop loving each other...”
“We want to remind people not just of the power of music, but the power of communication”
Never content to just talk the talk, this week feels like a masterclass in walking the walk. Holed-up in a hotel in Green Bay, Wisconsin, rehearsals are almost done for Act II of the Dance, Kid, Dance world tour, which will begin tomorrow at the 10,500-cap Resch Center a few miles up the road. Last night, however, he and Shinedown multi-instrumentalist Zach Myers were some 2,000 miles south-east for a last-minute set on the season finale of mainstream-straddling talent contest American Idol in Los Angeles. And at the end of the week they’ll be headlining Columbus, Ohio’s Sonic Temple alongside My Chemical Romance, Tool and Bring Me The Horizon. Exhausting as hopping between the worlds of pop, rock and metal undeniably is, that mentality is at the heart of Shinedown. Pigeonholes and gatekeeping are for other outfits. These guys just want good times for all people.
“It has always been the point of this band’s existence, right from inception, that Shinedown is for everyone,” Brent presses the point. “We’ve never looked at music with a centralised ideology of, ‘This is what you are. This is your genre. This is your box. Stay in your lane.’ That’s just never who we’ve been. I’ve always seen rock'n'roll more as a state of mind and a way of life than a genre of music. There’s an attitude built into that. It’s never about ‘rock music’, ‘rap music’, ‘pop music’, ‘alternative music’, ‘metal music’, ‘country music’. It’s about all music. Our approach remains pretty diverse because we’ve not allowed anyone to put us into a box over our 25 years as a band.”
Looking at the title format of Shinedown’s imminent eighth album, er, EI8HT, a certain breed of cinephile won’t be able to help flashing back to David Fincher’s infamously grotesque 1995 classic SE7EN. Brent is at pains, however, to stress that the record is has nothing to do with serial killers…
“It’s a combination of a few things,” he smiles. “Our art director Mark Obriski has been with us since 2015’s Threat To Survival and he gets to hear the songs right from the demo stage, then again in the form they’ll be presented to the world. Here, he had a few of the earliest the singles and one of the very first things he sent over was that word EIGHT in all-caps, but with the ‘G’ taken out and replaced by the ‘SD’ Shinedown logo. The way it tends to be printed, the ‘SD’ is replaced by the digit ‘8’, which adds another layer. And if you turn that sideways, it becomes an infinity symbol, which is fitting, because it’s not a final destination, just the next chapter of an ongoing journey.”
More important, arguably, are the Andy Warhol-style roses on the final cover art. Despite being ignored by much of the music press for most of their careers (K! have been onboard, but this is still Shinedown’s first time on a cover) Brent had seen a change of tone in the last few years: one particular feature acknowledging it was time to give these proven heavyweights their flowers.
“Thank you,” he says today. “But we don’t need any flowers. If there’s someone that does need that homage, that mark of respect, that heartfelt thanks, it’s the audience. It’s important to us that fans who pick up physical copies of our music receive something tangible. They can always look at the art and inlays and engage on a physical journey as they listen to the album.
“Looking at EI8HT, you see that the flowers on there are still alive, but some are a little tattered, a few of them have really been through it. It’s an acknowledgement that our fans have gone through all of this with us and we’re all still here, still flourishing. It all comes back to the central concept of Shinedown as a band name. You have to fall in the hole sometimes to figure out how you get back out of it again. Sometimes you shine. Sometimes you’re down. It’s the yin and the yang. Everything that’s good has a little bit of bad. Everything that’s bad has a little bit of good. What you need is balance.”
Unfortunately, there has been plenty of sadness to even out recent success. Bassist Eric Bass’ father passed away suddenly last year, followed by his aunt two months later and his wife Kelly’s sister. Brent said goodbye to his granny in the same 12 months, then his dear mother early in 2026.
Unlike Shinedown’s last two releases, EI8HT is not a concept record in the traditional sense. But it is a de facto double album with a mammoth 18 tracks. With such a substantial body to follow, singles were allowed to leak out through 2025 and early 2026, chief among them Three Six Five.
“It’s about how our defence mechanism, as humans, when someone passes away, is to say, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, I can’t believe they’re gone…’” Brent unpacks heavy, poignant ruminations. “But it’s arguing that although they aren’t physically still here, their spirit is everywhere. They’re in all corners of the stratosphere. What they taught you; how they loved you; the spirit they gave you lives on. We all have a date with destiny. But that doesn’t mean it’s something to be afraid of.”
Final track The Pilot is a similarly heavy ode to Eric’s dad, promising, ‘I’m stronger than I let on / But the light feels dimmer since you’re gone…’ Machine Gun is a gloriously shimmering celebration of Eric and Brent realising both their grandfathers had heroic stories about getting back to their grandmothers following World War Two. Imposter details years of working with the American Foundation For Suicide Prevention and talking to young people who have lost friends or thought about suicide and survived it. Dance, Kid, Dance is an unapologetic slice of drinking-from-the-hosepipe nostalgia about not losing your inner child, while Killing Fields is an acknowledgement of a fact that the singer alludes to repeatedly today, that Shinedown have only one boss: their fans.
“You shouldn’t be afraid of ‘What if?’ moments. You just turn ‘What if?’ into ‘Why not?!’”
Premiered during their performance at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry – headquarters of American country music – no song feels more significant than Searchlight. Inspired by soaking in the sound of icons from Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings to Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Travis Tritt and Dolly Parton, it’s a bold step into the twang for one of America’s biggest rock bands. More than that, it chronicles coming-of-age conversations between proud dad Brent and his son Lyric.
“Since he had been six years old, it had been in his mind’s eye that he wanted to be a basketball player,” Brent flicks back through the years. “But aged 15 he told me and his mother that it just didn’t feel fun any more. I just said that if it wasn’t fun, he didn’t need to play. Then I bought him a car when he turned 16, and the next thing I know I get a video from him with an acoustic guitar singing A Symptom Of Being Human. And he’s not just fumbling through it, he’s playing it. I was like, ‘What’s happening right now?!’ I had never pushed him towards music. It turned out as soon as he got the car he went straight to Guitar Centre, got an instrument, and 16 months later he’s a beast. Zach FaceTimes him all the time and he tells me [Lyric] is playing stuff that even he can’t!
“He said to me around then, ‘Dad, I don’t know what I want to do with my life, what I want to be, where I want to go…’ I told him anyone’s purpose can change on any given day. So it’s okay if you position your north star – your searchlight – in different locations throughout your life. You shouldn’t be afraid of those ‘What if?’ moments. You just turn that ‘What if?’ into a ‘Why not?!’”
Staging the most spectacular show possible has become part of the day-to-day for Shinedown, but there’s always space to break the fourth wall. Every night onstage, usually right after their second song, Brent will have the lights brought up on his audience for a show of hands on who’s seeing Shinedown for the very first time. In 2026, it could feel like corny crowd engagement, but as with so much of Brent’s personality, it’s done with earnest awe at how this continues to grow and grow.
“Music truly is the universal language,” he again underlines the importance of people becoming acquainted with one another. “Live music, in particular, whether that’s packing a 250-cap club or packing 250,000 people into at a massive festival. It’s about bringing strangers together – to be emotional, to feel catharsis, to release whatever needs to be released. After that show of hands, the next thing I ask them to do to is look around them, to the person on their left and their right. They might never have met them before that night, but we’re going to change that. I want to see everyone shaking hands, giving high fives, telling each other how nice it is to see them. What that does is it breaks the ice. As soon as that happens, there’s an energy that’s hard to describe...”
Born into a strictly religious household, Brent was brought up with teachings that rock‘n’roll was the work of the Devil. It’s fascinating to see how he’s transformed that same music into his own sort of belief system. It’s evident in his evangelical tone, today, but also in a Spartan life offstage.
“I had a home in California from 2010 to 2016, but I was inside maybe a total of six months,” he describes an unconventional living situation for one of the world’s most successful frontmen. “I looked at this big empty house and realised that it really needed to go to a family. So I sold it and I’ve been living in hotels, without a mortgage ever since. I used to love calling up my mom, sitting in some rental car outside her house, and waiting until she’d ask when I’d be home next to ring the doorbell. This 40-year-old man always with a bag of laundry, coming home to wash his clothes.
“When people ask why I still live like this, I think of what my mom would say when she was alive. She gave birth to me. She raised me. She watched me grow up. She knew. People would ask, ‘What is he running from?’ She’d say, ‘He’s not running from anything. He’s running towards everything…’ And people would say, ‘He’s, like, homeless!’ She’d reply, ‘He’s not homeless. He’s home-free…’”
Sort of like a harder rocking Jack Reacher, K! offers, living life on one’s own unconstrained terms?
“Yeah,” Brent enjoys the comparison. “Just without all the expertise in firearms and martial arts…”
But with the same heroic willingness to do the best for others. Overcoming his own struggles with addiction and mental health daily, Brent feels like a musician constantly giving back. Aside from aforementioned work with the AFSP, Shinedown raised $300,000 for Direct Relief during COVID before working alongside and whipping up a similar sum for Musicians On Call last year. A similar drive for cancer research and treatment organisation City Of Hope is set for 2026. Aside from those headline-grabbing full-band efforts, Brent has also made lower-profile personal donations, like the $10,000 to Spiritbox when they were blind-sided by a cancelled tour with Limp Bizkit in 2021 or the £10,000 contributed to the memorial fund of beloved UK PR Michelle Kerr in 2024.
Brent pauses for a moment as we lay out many of the ways he’s gone above and beyond, initially uneasy with the praise, then emotionally steering conversation back towards mental health.
“If something we do helps save even one life, that’s enough,” the Tennessee accent cracks for a second. “That’s really what it’s all about. And hopefully there’s a snowball effect to that, too, with others picking up where we’ve left off. So many people that come to us and say that, ‘Your music is the reason that I’m still here’ or, ‘You’re the reason that I’m alive!’ But we’re not the reason. You’ve got to find that inside of yourself. To go through what you went through and still be here. And we’re so, so glad that you are still here, because the world is so much cooler with you in it.”
The world is cooler with Shinedown in it, too. Creatively possessed of confidence to explore every ounce of influence beating through their musical veins, logistically equipped to deliver awe-inspiring shows anywhere on earth and spiritually in-tune with the broader endeavour, EI8HT could really be just another step towards world domination. Not that Brent would be so arrogant.
“You are talking to one extremely lucky individual,” he signs off, reflectively. “Lucky to be alive. Lucky to have found the people that he found at certain stages in life. Grateful for them. Now, the four of us in this band are just locked in. I read recently about the 205 sovereign flags on Earth and we’d love to bring Shinedown to share in the culture of as many of those places as would have us, to have enjoy experiences, to keep proving the power of music, love, communication and the belief that that human beings are inherently good. Because we’ve all only got a finite amount of time on this planet before we reach our date with destiny...”
EI8HT is released May 29. Get your exclusive magenta vinyl with signed art card now.
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