Cage The Elephant announce their forthcoming sixth studio album, Neon Pill

Nine months into the pandemic, Matthew and Brad Shultz lost their father. The band weathered the back-to-back deaths of friends, while Matthew experienced depression and a mental breakdown, culminating in hospitalisation. Coming out on the other side, he learned quite a bit about himself, and gained a whole lot of strength and wisdom. Neon Pill came to life in the eye of the storm.

“"Out Loud" is very connected to my father. My dad’s the reason we discovered music in the first place. When he died, ‘Out Loud’ just poured out of me. My efforts towards the song were deeply rooted in paying honor to him, and I knew it meant a lot to Brad too,” Matthew remarks. “That, also in connection with the difficulties that I was dealing with at that time. It was almost a subconscious apology of sorts before I was fully capable of grasping the gravity of it all. Subconsciously working through it while channeling all of the adversity my family faced growing up coming full circle into my adult life in this one song.”

“To me, Neon Pill is the first record where we were consistently uninfluenced, and I mean that in a positive way,” observes Shultz. “Everything is undoubtedly expressed through having settled into finding our own voice. We’ve always drawn inspiration from artists we love, and at times we’ve even emulated some of them to a certain degree. With this album, having gone through so much, life had almost forced us into becoming more and more comfortable with ourselves. We weren’t reaching for much outside of the pure experience of self expression, and simultaneously not necessarily settling either. We just found a uniqueness in simply existing.”

Neon Pill, produced by John Hill, materialised during sessions at Sonic Ranch in El Paso, Electric Lady in New York, Sound Emporium in Nashville, Echo Mountain in North Carolina, and at Hill’s own studio in Los Angeles, and alchemized a season of tragedy and turbulence into the twelve tracks on their sixth full-length album.