Extreme’s New Album Is Like ‘Pornograffitti 2’
Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt said the band started calling their upcoming album Pornograffitti 2, after it went through several stages of development before nearing completion.
It’s been 12 years since the release of Saudades De Rock, but Bettencourt and singer Gary Cherone both looked back to their second LP, 1990's Extreme 2: Pornograffitti, when they discussed the upcoming record. The project went through several stages of development.
“We probably have about three to four albums done,” Bettencourt told Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM, explaining the time delay. “Not 'done done,' but we did an album pretty quickly. One thing I always said to Gary, ever since we started this band, is I never wanna release anything that I can't wait to play to people, that I just can't wait to share. I don't wanna put out albums just for the sake of putting out albums.”
He added that he "loved the stuff we were doing, but then I started writing some other stuff that I liked better. And then we kind of scrapped that. Then I latched onto something where we thought we had an album done about two years ago, and then I just tapped into these three or four songs. It was a 'stop the presses' kind of moment for me, and I went, 'That's it.' It reminded me of when we kind of tapped into Pornograffitti … where it was a big kind of uppercut. Gary refers to this album as ‘Porno 2.0’ every time he jokes about it, but it's very much like that kind of excitement for us.”
Bettencourt noted that work was almost complete, with Cherone due to record final vocal “touch-ups” in the coming days. A release date for the record hasn't been announced yet.
“It's probably one of the hungriest-sounding Extreme albums I've ever done,” Bettencourt said. “It's heavy and it's full of fire. I would say that this is even probably Gary's best album he's done. This is his album, I would say.”