Ricky Phillips Says Styx Will ‘Absolutely’ Make a New Album
Styx went 14 years between albums until the release of 2017's The Mission, but fans won't have to wait that long again. In a new interview, bassist Ricky Phillips said the band will "absolutely" make a new record, and have internally discussed plans to start work on it.
"I think there's already ideas flowing," he said on Audio Ink Radio (via Blabbermouth). "And as soon as we find a break — probably more towards the end of the year — we'll probably start formulating those ideas a little deeper. But, yeah, it's in motion."
Phillips noted that the changes in the industry since 2003's Cyclorama made Styx question whether an album made sense in this day and age.
"We had witnessed people putting out records that we thought were good, of our peers — major bands — and they were kind of going nowhere," he noted. "So we thought part of that was part of maybe the exercise of abstaining. ... Everybody's going, 'Oh, it doesn't make sense. It won't sell.' 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.'"
Even though the band had carved out a niche as a solid touring draw playing selections from its extensive back catalog, the creative juices didn't stop.
"We're still songwriters, so we've all been collecting all these ideas over the years," Phillips said. "And Tommy [Shaw] came up with the concept for the mission to Mars that is supposed to happen in the year 2033, and it just developed and developed, and it got bigger and better."