Motley Crue's farewell tour is keeping Nikki Sixx pretty busy these days, but he's still managed to find the time to finish the upcoming third LP from his Sixx: AM project, which is due Oct. 7.

Sixx opened up about the new album in 2013 during an interview with Revolver, explaining the difference between the band's latest output and its previous two releases, 2007's 'The Heroin Diaries' and 2011's 'This Is Gonna Hurt.' "We feel like between 'The Heroin Diaries' and 'This is Gonna Hurt', we've exposed a lot of wounds and we've talked about how to recover from them, but we haven't had a chance to really celebrate," Sixx mused. "I think this album is a celebration."

Fittingly for a celebration, Sixx says the new songs hearken back to the band members' influences -- some of which may surprise fans. "We put a lot fewer restrictions on ourselves. We went into genres that you wouldn't expect us to possibly be influenced by, but unless you know the band members, you don't know that there are all kinds of influences, especially from the '70s and some of the great bands that came out of that era," he explained. "We were creating something so different, and once we got the songs written, people said, 'God, it reminds me of Queen's 'Night At The Opera' at times. It reminds me of the Edgar Winter Group's 'Free Ride' and these amazing things off of 'They Only Come Out At Night.'"

All in all, Sixx predicts, "I think Sixx: AM fans are going to love this record and I think new people will come in and be really surprised by it and become fans as well. I don't think our first two records sound like the same type of record, but I do think there's a sound with the band and I think we're going to continue on that tradition."

Although the album's Oct. 7 release date is still a ways off, fans can expect to hear the first single, 'Gotta Get It Right,' quite a bit sooner; the band's Facebook page predicts that it'll be heading to radio in mid-August, with a video to follow.

And if October feels like too long to wait for new music, you can take comfort in the knowledge that the record will arrive in stores quicker than guitarist DJ Ashba expected. In May, he told PCM World News that he felt like an early 2015 release was in the cards and even entertained the idea of a tour, although he stressed that between his gig with Guns N' Roses, Sixx's Crue commitments, and singer James Michael's production career, scheduling is always a problem.

"Everyone forgets that we were never really a band per se," he pointed out. "We weren’t like, 'Hey, let’s start a band!' It just became this monster and we kind of just got together as three best friends who were writers and producers and wrote an album together for fun and had no idea that it was going to have the impact it did, so we weren’t really all prepared to say, 'Hey, let’s go tour.' I mean, we don't even have a drummer to this day."

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