The first time Morgan Rose heard the song that would announce the next chapter of his band’s career, he tried to kill it. He had wandered into one of the writing rooms during sessions for Sevendust‘s fifteenth album, listened to a half-built track he assumed was still missing its vocals, and delivered a quick verdict. “I came in and said, ‘Well, that’s not going to make the record,'” the drummer recalls. Lajon Witherspoon had already cut a vocal on it. It sounded great. A few months later that song, Is This The Real You?, was the first single Sevendust sent into the world.
Rose finds this funny, and he should. “It was surprising that it was actually the first song out,” he says. There was no grand design behind leading with it, no statement the band was trying to plant; management simply liked it as a first taste. The deeper truth is that there was no grand design behind any of ONE, out now on Napalm Records, and that absence is the whole point.
“During the recording of the record, we had no expectations,” Rose says. “We went in for the first time in a long time without any real direction or any thoughts of keeping the record cohesive. We just went in and wrote songs.” For a band thirty-plus years and fifteen records into their career, with a GRAMMY nomination and a catalogue stretching back to a gold-selling self-titled debut, that is a strange way to operate, and a brave one. The shape of the album only emerged once the songs piled up. “After like three or four, we realized, I’m really liking where this is going,” he says. “We really didn’t know what we had until we were done.”
The band’s biggest commercial moment had arrived just before, when Everything became a career-high radio hit in 2024. Plenty of groups would have mined that vein. Rose waves it off. “Everything was a successful track, but I don’t think we’ve ever gone into a record off of anything that’s come from the prior record and thought, ‘Oh, that worked, so let’s do that again.'” The well was deep enough that they didn’t have to. Dozens of ideas never reached pre-production. The band kept the fourteen or fifteen they “thought were the strongest” and let the rest go.
What the loose approach produced, more than anything, was room for surprise, and the clearest example sits at the very end of the record. Misdirection, the atmospheric closer, is sung on its verses by rhythm guitarist John Connolly, his first lead vocal on a Sevendust album. “Nobody seems to get their assumption right of who’s actually singing those verses,” Rose says. Connolly wrote the whole thing and laid down a scratch vocal, and the band told him he was keeping it. “It’s definitely one of my favourite tracks on the record, both lyrically and musically. So it was cool to give him that spotlight.” Closing on the oddest song in the pile is, by now, a Sevendust reflex. “We’re notorious for ending the record either with something super heavy or something super different.”
The other engine of surprise was the man behind the board. Producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette was handed more control than the band usually gives up. “We’ve been known to kind of squeeze our ideas regardless of what any producer really feels about it,” Rose admits. “We gave the reins to him on this one.” What followed was a lot of Baskette telling a veteran drummer his instincts were wrong. “I would come in with like a vocal thing and he would basically be like, ‘That ain’t gonna work,’ and I’m like ‘shit,’ and he’d say ‘go back.'” Baskette pushed for fewer words here, more melody there, less aggression somewhere else, the kind of calls the band, by Rose’s account, “weren’t even doing.” As he puts it: “We were doing stuff that he was putting the X on.”
For all the surrendering, the band’s instincts still run the sequencing. Sevendust open heavy by habit, and the title track, all riff and groove, made the call easy; from there they front-loaded the strongest material and kept the heavy songs from clumping together. The question of who sings what is just as intuitive, and just as unplanned. Rose takes a sung lead on Unbreakable and screams alongside Clint Lowery on Blood Price, while Lowery’s voice surfaces and vanishes across the album. Bassist Vince Hornsby, Rose mentions almost as an aside, did not sing on it at all. “We never really go in thinking, ‘This guy’s going to sing more,'” he says. “We just fly by the seat of our pants when we get in there.”
If the method was surrender, the meaning was togetherness, and that is where the title comes from. “The band got super close. We had things that happened inside that we needed to lean on each other,” Rose says. After three decades with the same five people, the sentiment arrived without ceremony. “We just kind of looked around at each other and were like, ‘Wow, man, I really do care about all these guys. They’re brothers to me. And we are one.'” Lowery came up with the name, and Rose suspects there is more to it than he knows, but his own reading is plain: the five of them, and everyone who has followed them, as a single thing.
That following is not an abstraction to Sevendust. The “7D Army” fills sold-out rooms and gets the band’s logo tattooed on their bodies, and Rose treats the devotion as a two-way street rather than a marketing line. “We don’t ever tune them out in any way,” he says. The loyalty, he figures, comes from recognition; the band writes about what it has actually lived, and the audience has usually lived the same things. “It makes it easier to feel comfortable in writing and being vulnerable, because we’ve done it for so long that it’s just telling another story of something else that we’ve gone through.”
The bands chosen for the album cycle came down to the same instinct. Atreyu and Fire From The Gods, along with Lowery’s managed project American Adrenaline, were acts Sevendust admired first and had grown close to on the road second. “It was a no-brainer,” Rose says, “a very quick decision.”
There is, fittingly, one song on ONE that Rose cannot explain at all. Ask him what the defiant-sounding We Won is about and he hands the floor back. “I really don’t know what he wrote it about,” he says of Lowery’s lyric. He was not even in the room when it came together. “It’s one of my favourite songs on the record, but that’s really a Clint Lowery question.”
ONE is out now via Napalm Records
Photo Credit: Chuck Brueckmann
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