“I feel great man,” enthused Kyle Shutt, guitarist for Austin, Texas stoner rockers The Sword ahead of their sixth studio album Used Future to be released on March 23. “It’s a really fresh sound for us. We’ve been a band a really long time and I’m really excited to take this album out on the road. We wrote it mainly in the studio and I still don’t know how to play it all yet (laughs). I’m really excited to jump into that aspect of things. When you make an album and you get ready to release it it’s like you sit in front of the computer and send emails and stuff but my favourite part is when we finally get to leave all that behind and get out on the road and play some shows.”
While undoubtedly people will try to classify Used Future based on previous records, Shutt says the album and its contents can be summed up pretty easily.
“I would call it rock and roll,” he shrugged. “I’ve been listening to a lot of 60’s and 70’s music and I think that has come through in my guitar playing a little bit more rather than some of the acrobatic stuff I did in the past. It’s all about trying to keep it interesting to ourselves too, you know what I mean? We’ve never been a band to make an album to please any certain people, we just made the albums that we wanted to hear and we really dig this one. It’s a pretty uneasy album with dark topics that we deal with day to day. It’s pretty fresh in that regard.”
After the sonic differences on previous album High Country, The Sword have added more structure and depth to their sound again on Used Future, with Shutt admitting the band needs to continue to grow musically for their own sanity as much as the fans.
“When we made Apocryphon, our fourth album, that was as far as we could have taken that style of heavy metal,” he reflected, “and I think if we would have kept playing and writing songs in C all down-tuned I think that we would have probably lost interest in the band. We decided to tune our guitars up to E flat, mostly because… I was into it because I write a lot of the songs in E so us playing them in E flat made a lot more sense and also when we did JD was able to song lower instead of the other way around which you think it would be.”
To learn more about the album, including where the title came from, as well as reliving a bit of the past of The Sword and the turning point in the band’s music that almost brought it all crashing down tune into the below audio interview.
