When Alter Bridge officially formed in 2004 as Creed broke up, the band had no idea it would be going strong for nearly 20 years. But here they are in 2023, having recently released a seventh album, 2022’s Pawns & Kings.
“We didn’t know if we’d be doing Alter Bridge two records later at that point when we first started out,” Mark Tremonti admitted to Heavy Consequence when we recently caught up with the guitarist. “Thank goodness we survived and made it this far.”
Featuring three Creed members (Tremonti, bassist Brian Marshall, and drummer Scott Phillips) and singer Myles Kennedy, Alter Bridge have become one of hard rock’s mainstay groups over the past two decades. They’re currently headlining a North American tour with support from Wolfgang Van Halen’s Mammoth WVH, and have just added a new spring leg featuring special guests Sevendust. (Pick up tickets via Ticketmaster or StubHub).
Pawns & Kings features the soaring melodies and anthemic choruses upon which Alter Bridge were built, but the album also veers into new territory with some dark, edgy numbers.
One of those darker tracks is the single “Sin After Sin,” which at more than six minutes long is one of Alter Bridge’s most epic tunes to date.
“For ‘Sin After Sin,’ I wanted to write a heavy, slow, groovy, dark and doomy kind of song, because I was listening to music like that at the time,” Tremonti said. “So, I broke out my guitar and wrote that riff out of the gate, and that riff was the seed planted for that whole song. I spent a month playing that drum loop and writing parts and parts until I felt I had the main parts. Then, I had to go through 60 different parts, and I said, ‘I can’t get rid of this!’ That’s why it’s a six and a half minute song. I didn’t want to eliminate parts. When people ask why we write long songs or what’s the different approach, I think it’s us being possessive about these parts we’ve written and not wanting to cut any.”