Godsmack

After 20-plus years as the drummer in Godsmack, one would think drummer Shannon Larkin had seen it all – and undoubtedly he has seen a lot. But he said when the group wrapped up rehearsals in April for the first leg of 2023 touring, he heard Sully Erna, the singer, songwriter, rhythm guitarist, and founding member of Godsmack, say something he’s rarely expressed ahead of the launch of a tour.

“By the end (of rehearsals), Sully isn’t usually like ever ‘We sound great.’ It’s always ‘Ah, you know, we’ve got work to do.’ Even (after) a year on tour, he’s still messing with the set list,” Larkin said. “We ended this with him (Erna), who never really gives it up and says we sound great, he says ‘We sound great. We’re going to be OK.’”

The guys in Godsmack – Erna, Larkin, guitarist Tony Rombola and bassist Robbie Merrill – have good reason to be on point. This will be the last time the band does what’s known as a cycle tour, where music acts typically spend a year-plus on the road promoting their latest album or EP.

Erna and his bandmates have recently announced that their new album, “Lighting Up the Sky,” will be their last as Godsmack. With that, the band will no longer need to do the cycle tours that have followed each of their eight studio albums. It’s not the end of the road for Godsmack, just time to ease up on what has been a rather all-consuming career.

“I hope everybody knows we’re not going away,” Larkin said, reassuring fans that Godsmack is not breaking up. “We will go out and play after this (cycle tour promoting) ‘Lighting Up the Sky’ is all done. We’re going to call each other up and say ‘Hey man, let’s go rock two or three weeks of shows this year’... And (we’ll) be able to control our lives for once instead of music controlling us.”

That last sentence gets to a key reason Godsmack are done with making full albums. Since seeing their 1999 self-titled debut album go quadruple platinum and spawn four top 10 singles, Erna, Larkin, Rombola and Merrill have felt pressure to live up to the successes of their previous output every time they’ve made a new album.

They’ve thrived despite that, building a catalog that includes 26 top 10 singles, 12 of which have gone No. 1 on “Billboard” magazine’s mainstream rock chart. But it’s time to say goodbye to the weight of expectations.

“You have lots of pressure to be successful and to continue to be successful. And the pressure sometimes is in your own mind and you’re putting it on yourself,” Larkin said. And the fact is, Godsmack have achieved everything the four band members set out to accomplish.

“We finally came to the decision that gosh, we’ve climbed the mountain that we envisioned reaching the top of when we are 10-, 12-, 13-year-old kids picking up our instruments,” Larkin said. “We don’t want to quit. But we do want to just, I like to say, jump off of the machine and not have to sell product after so many years of touring and selling product.”

There are other reasons why Godsmack will gear things down after the “Lighting Up the Sky” cycle. Some of the band members want to spend time with their families or have other hobbies and interests they want to pursue. And with the band members in their 50s, it’s not getting any easier to meet the physical demands of extensive tours.

The band members also feel with “Lighting Up the Sky,” they’re ending their run of Godsmack albums on a high note. Larkin said “Lighting Up the Sky” was the easiest album Godsmack has made, and to a man, the band members consider it their best release yet.

“For this one, we wrote over 20 songs. We had three years, with the pandemic and stuff. In fact, at one point we had written pretty much a whole record of music, and it was a totally different thing where it was like Pink Floyd, long-ass songs,” he said. “We wrote like 11 songs (initially) and we ended up keeping ‘Surrender,’ ‘Growing Old’ and ‘Red, White & Blue.’ Those three stayed. We had taken a break from writing and he (Erna) comes back with ‘Soul On Fire’ and God, it was just relentless, ‘What About Me’ and ‘Let’s Go.’ Just all of these songs started just pouring out and it was so easy for us and we were like ‘Wow!’”

Now it’s time to hit the road, and Larkin said several of the new songs will be in Godsmack’s visually spectacular shows. (“We blow a lot of stuff up live,” Larkin noted with a chuckle.) The band members, after all, are promoting “Lighting Up the Sky.” But fans will hear plenty of the hits, too.

“We know that look, even if our new record is our favorite one and it’s great, we can’t oversaturate a set list when we have all of these radio hits that people expect to hear,” Larkin said.

Godsmack will be playing at Darien Lake Performing Arts Center on Sunday.