Nikki Sixx says Mötley Crüe are done with albums, explaining the songwriting math behind his decision to release singles only.
Eighteen years have passed since Mötley Crüe put out a studio album. Nikki Sixx has now explained why that gap is a decision rather than a delay, and he has done the arithmetic out loud.
Speaking to “Joann Butler In Studio With…“, the bassist laid out what a conventional album actually costs a band at this stage.
“Honestly — I know fans don’t wanna hear this, but I don’t believe in making full-length records anymore at this time on the planet, for me. The amount of work that goes into… If you’re doing 10 songs on a record, you gotta write 20. And you better hope five of ’em are stellar. It’s a lot of lyrics, a lot of notes, a lot of chord changes, a lot of time in the studio, which is all fine. That’s what we do. We work hard. But what I don’t like is that when people hear one song, and you recorded 10 or you recorded 20, and then 10 of ’em were demos and 10 was an album, they only hear one. Radio’s changed, streaming is changing and evolving as we go. So I’m really into the idea of lightning strikes, something comes down, I call the guys. I got this song, it’s just sitting on the tip of my tongue right now. I told Tommy [Lee, Mötley Crüe drummer] about it a year ago. I just told my friend, and he goes, ‘You told me to write a song called that 25 years ago.’ And I go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna finish the song and then show it to the band.’ But it’s like having a song and a whole team behind a song and being able to get the fans to really understand what the song is about. It’s just not something that they just pass by, or they go to the new Mötley Crüe album, and they only listen to one song. So I love the idea of like we did The Dirt [film soundtrack in 2019]. We did five [new] songs from The Dirt. We did three songs on this EP [Cancelled] we just did [in 2024]. I mean, that’s already a full-length record. So I think we’re just gonna keep going, like whenever something comes up, you feel something — heartbreak, joy, rebellion — let’s write a song about it, and let’s go cut it in the studio,” Sixx said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
The soundtrack figure is slightly off. Mötley Crüe cut four new recordings for “The Dirt” in 2018: “The Dirt (Est. 1981) (Feat. Machine Gun Kelly)“, “Ride With The Devil“, “Crash And Burn” and a version of Madonna‘s “Like A Virgin“. Add the three tracks on the Cancelled EP and the tally sits at seven, not eight.
The position itself is not new. Sixx told fans the same thing during a Q&A on his X (formerly Twitter) account on August 5, writing that he believes in releasing songs one at a time rather than albums, and pointing to the three recent tracks plus the soundtrack material as more than an album’s worth already. Two years before that, he told Riff X‘s “Metal XS” that he saw no reason to book studio time while the band still had singles sitting finished and unreleased.
The unfinished song he mentions is the one piece of forward-looking news here. He has been carrying the title long enough that Tommy Lee heard about it a year ago, and a friend reminded him he had floated the same idea a quarter of a century earlier.
Asked whether any album or song from his four and a half decades in the band stands above the rest, Sixx declined to rank them and traced the catalogue back to where each record found him.
He explained: “They all mean something different to me. I was at different places at different times in my life. Writing a song like ‘Knock ‘Em Dead, Kid‘ after I’d got in a fight with the police on Sunset Boulevard and ended up in jail is something that I needed to do at the time. I was in revenge mode. I was in my 20s and full of p*ss and vinegar. And yet by the time we moved over to Theatre Of Pain, the band had been on the road for so many years, opening for Ozzy [Osbourne] mostly, we got an opportunity, like with ‘Home Sweet Home‘ to do some different kind of halftime things, like a song called ‘Save Our Souls‘. So that’s a departure from Shout At The Devil, which was a departure from Too Fast [For Love]. And it’s a constant evolution. We never quite know where we’re going. When opportunity strikes, something comes up.”
“Knock ‘Em Dead, Kid” appeared on 1983’s Shout At The Devil, while “Home Sweet Home” and “Save Our Souls” both came from 1985’s Theatre Of Pain, the record that pushed the band toward the power ballad that defined their radio presence.
The band’s last full studio album remains 2008’s Saints Of Los Angeles, followed by a Greatest Hits compilation in 2009. Everything since has come in smaller pieces.
Cancelled arrived on October 4, 2024 through Big Machine Records and ran three tracks: the title song, “Dogs Of War” and a cover of Beastie Boys‘ “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)“. All three were recorded in April 2023 with longtime producer Bob Rock, and the EP marked the recording debut of John 5, who joined in the fall of 2022 after co-founding guitarist Mick Mars retired from touring that October because of ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory condition affecting the spine.
The Big Machine relationship goes back further than the EP. The label released Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute To Mötley Crüe in 2014, on which Rascal Flatts, Florida Georgia Line, Darius Rucker and others covered the band’s catalogue, and it also handled John 5‘s 2021 solo album Sinner.
