Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt admitted the band’s fans have been kept waiting for too long for a new album, but says the group are planning to release what will be their sixth LP later this year. By that time it will be more than 10 years since their last release, Saudades de Rock, which arrived in August 2008.

“You should have already seen another album – at least two by now, if not three,” Bettencourt said in a new interview with Australia’s Heavy magazine (via Blabbermouth). “We’re kind of disappointed in ourselves that we haven’t released something yet, because we have so much material, and we’ve been going back and forth… I’m happy to say that we have a good actual vision right now of what we want to do. We have a good 20, 25 songs that we’re almost wrapped up with. My goal is that by the fall, we have a new album out.”

He said of Extreme’s history: “We split up for a bit, and we didn't play for a good eight to ten years. It's not always roses. It's hard being in a band. It's hard being in a relationship like that. But at the end of the day, when you have great fans, as corny as that sounds, if the fans show up and the passion that they have, they're the ones that make us want to keep going.”

Of their approach to songwriting, he commented: “We've never written anything to have success with it. We've written songs that we love. We didn't write [“More Than Words”] to be a hit, and we weren't about to chase it trying to write another one like it. We just wrote, and we always stuck to that. We still stick to that."

Extreme’s touring schedule includes a run of Australian shows with Mr.Big in June, followed by dates in Asia and North America.

 

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