“Music is medicine. It can heal you. It really can”: Shinedown’s Brent Smith on finding inspiration in a hurricane, the “genius” Rick Beato, and why you don’t need to be play guitar to write a great rock song

Brent Smith of Shinedown performs during the US rockers' Dance, Kid, Dance Tour 2025.

What ever Shinedown is doing, it is working. Here is a band who have not released a full studio album since 2022’s Planet Zero, and yet this year – once again – they have been tearing it up on the festival circuit and will be spending the hottest months of summer packing out arenas across the US.

This time they at least have a double A-side single behind them, a taste of things to come from their next studio album, which frontman Brent Smith tells us is “roughly 85 per cent” finished, pencilled in for a release in the first quarter of 2026.