Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess says the band are looking to return to the studio in May this year.
They announced in December that they had signed a new deal with Sony Music/Inside Out for the follow-up to 2016’s The Astonishing, with guitarist John Petrucci previously reporting that he didn’t expect a new record until at least 2019.
And Rudess has backed up those comments, saying that he envisions a new album to launch “in a year or so.”
Speaking with Vintage Rock at last weekend’s NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, Rudess says: “We’re not going to get into the studio until May. It’ll take some time to create. It’ll probably come out in a year or so, or maybe a little less.
“We’ll hit the road sometime after that, but May is the time when we’re looking to get in the studio again.”
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Rudess says that while the band don’t usually have much in the way of leftover material once an album has been completed, Dream Theater have some ideas left over from The Astonishing sessions.
He says: “One of the things that happened with The Astonishing, is that we actually had many more ideas than we used.
“A lot of times we’ll apply ourselves to the album knowing what we want to do. But for The Astonishing, we did have a lot of ideas that we didn’t use – not because they were necessarily not good ideas, but because we were trying to really craft something that helped to tell the story – maybe something just didn’t work as well.
“So we have some things in the can. They’re nice ideas that weren’t part of it.”
Speaking last year, Petrucci admitted that their live shows celebrating 1992’s Images & Words could have an influence on their next record.
He said: “I think that reconnecting with the music from the era that we’re playing now and kind of where our headspace was in the early 90s, it’s reconnected us with the musical style of that period of Dream Theater.
“It’s been really interesting talking about how we’re gonna approach the next record and everything. We’re psyched.”
Further album details will be revealed in due course.
