Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith says that the Californian quartet have “lots of new music” written for the follow-up to their 2016 album The Getaway, and promises “we’re coming back and it’s going to be great.”
In a new interview with SiriusXM's Pop Rocks, Smith hails prodigal son guitarist John Frusciante’s return to the Chili Peppers family as “really exciting and fun”, and declares the band “very excited” about the new material they’ve amassed since the departure of Josh Klinghoffer late in 2019.
“We just kind of picked up where we left off,” says Smith of Frusciante’s re-integration into the unit. “We've known each other for so long — obviously, 30-plus years — so it's like putting on a nicely well-worn pair of shoes that feel really good, and you get back in there and it's comfortable and a little bit different, but still we're doing our thing. So it's been really fun.”
Frusciante previously described his return to the band as like "returning to family” and said “we're all just as comfortable with each other as we ever were, and it just felt like that right off the bat.”
Speaking about the much-anticipated new Chili Peppers album, Chad Smith says, “we've been kind of taking our time, and we have lots of new music, and we're very excited about it, and when it's done, it's done, and we'll put it out, and we'll go play some concerts next year.”
“We look forward to being in front of people again, like everybody wants to be so badly, us included,” he added. “Not only having new music to play, but also we just wanna play live. And that's such an important part of life's experiences and certainly of being a band. It's really important to us. We were gonna play last summer. But we want it to be safe for everyone and a really good experience for everyone, so we pushed everything off, but we're coming back, and it's gonna be great.”
At present there are no RHCP gigs on the horizon, and no firm news on when their twelfth studio album might see the light of day.
