After years of putting all their efforts into their new record, Simple Plan finally released ‘Taking One For The Team’ this February. Obviously, the 5-year-long wait for the new album (since their previous record [Get Your Heart On!] came out in 2011) has not been easy on their fans and many have become very impatient towards the end, mostly when seeing other bands putting out records every two or three years.
But Simple Plan have never been like other bands. As they’ve said countless times in various interviews, they’re a band that focuses mostly on the live experience and they want to tour as much as they can in between records. And if we add the huge success of the third single from GYHO – ‘Summer Paradise’ – to it, it’s becoming very clear that the guys haven’t been just sitting around for those 5 years. For two years – from summer of 2011 till summer of 2013, the band has toured extensively all over the world, even with a few more shows in 2014 and 2015. However during the last two years, the guys decided to take a little time off to relax and be home with their families, after which they spent the next year and half working, song-writing and recording TOFTT.
However, things may be changing for record number six! Jeff recently discussed Simple Plan’s future plans regarding touring and their next record in an interview with Journal Express:
“We will try to limit [this tour] to 18 months of touring, because the last time we felt some impatience from our fans for taking five years between albums. I think it will be important after this tour to begin immediately to work on the next record.” – Jeff Stinco
From Jeff’s quote we can assume that the band still has about a year of touring for TOFTT ahead of them. We already know there are some plans on coming back to Europe early next year, after which there could be some more tour and maybe summer festivals, but the Taking One For The Team tour could be coming to an end around the fall of 2017. That would make the touring process slightly shorter than it was in the GYHO era. At that point, the band may – according to Jeff’s words – in fact start slowly working on their sixth record with little to no delay. But keep in mind that that process can again, unfortunately, take at least a year.
But who knows, maybe the band will take an example of their work towards the end of the process of making of TOFTT, where they wrote some of their fans’ most popular songs on the record (Opinion Overload, Farewell and Nostalgic) in just a few weeks in the pop-punk song-writing sessions in the fall of last year – and therefore make the next process quicker. It is undeniable that Simple Plan can work fast and – most importantly – with very good results, when they’re under pressure. The question is how much pressure they want to put themselves under for the sixth milestone of their career.
Will we see Simple Plan’s sixth album on the shelves of our local music stores in 2018 or 2019? We shall wait and see. But there is now a bigger hope for a much quicker release than it was with TOFTT.
