Sevendust drummer Morgan Rose recently confirmed that the band engaged in serious conversations about retiring before ultimately deciding to shift their focus toward international touring. The veteran metal outfit is currently promoting their latest studio album, One, and preparing for a major push into overseas markets.
In a new interview with Damian FitzGerald of the “Ampocalypse” podcast, the musician discussed the Atlanta quintet’s upcoming European headline tour, which marks their first such run in eight years. Following a successful arena support slot alongside Alter Bridge in March, Sevendust will return for an extensive 16-date trek across Europe in November and December of 2026.
When asked about the timing of their return to Europe, Morgan Rose detailed the series of setbacks that had previously derailed their international plans.
“Well, we’d been trying to get back, and we had multiple opportunities to come back. I think the most… Well, other than COVID destroying one of them, the one prior to that was the end of 2019, and I ended up getting gravely ill the night before we were leaving,” Morgan explained.
The drummer elaborated on the severe financial realities of touring overseas and how past cancellations forced the band to reevaluate their entire future, leading directly to discussions of ending the project altogether.
“A lot of people don’t really know or care or understand how those things happen,” he continued. “So when you have multiple cancelations — we went through many years of going into Europe or the U.K. and midway through the tour being told, ‘Hey, you guys have lost, like, 70 or 80 thousand dollars, and you’re gonna lose another 70 or 80 if you stay for the rest of the tour.’ And we’re, like, ‘This is gonna end up destroying us over here. These people will give up. They will grow tired of us telling them we’re coming and then leaving or not coming.’ And it happened. So we really wanted to come. And we had kind of, I think, accepted the fact that we were gonna be a predominantly American, U.S. touring band, and that we had missed the opportunity.”
He added: “And that was where there’s this big quote going around [from a recent interview] where I said that we were gonna retire after the next record, or after this record that we’ve just done, and that’s just a fact. It was discussed. It was absolutely discussed. I don’t have to go back into it again and rehash it, but the reason behind it was that we really don’t have anywhere to go. Who in their right mind do you think would go on their fifteenth record and say, ‘Let’s commit to trying to open up the rest of the world’? And it was us. We decided that was it. We were, like, ‘Okay, there’s another option here. Instead of wrapping it up and just doing a farewell run in the United States, let’s just bag that and put that in the back for a while, and let’s see what happens if we go and try to see if there’s people that care about us around the rest of the world.’ And the first stop was Europe and the U.K. And it was massive. And we were, like, ‘S**t. Looks like we’re gonna park it in the U.K. and Europe for the next few years.’ So now that’s being set up for us to do multiple trips back over the next few years… I know that there’s definitely talk of two or three more trips over to Europe before the end of ’27.”
During a recent interview with Stan Bicknell, he detailed how the group had seriously discussed winding down their career and even outlined plans for a massive farewell tour before ultimately changing their minds.
“We went through this period of time where we just weren’t touring as much. We were kind of thinking that we were gonna land the plane a little bit, like, ‘Let’s slow it down to a farewell thing,’ which we had discussed, for sure. And then some other things happened, and we decided, ‘You know what? Instead of parking the car here, why don’t we just put it all the way into drive, like all the way in, and let’s tour like harder than we’ve ever toured and just burn the car out. Like, ‘Let’s tackle things that we haven’t done.’ So that happened. Just overnight, it was a decision that went from ‘We’re gonna retire’ to ‘No, no, no. We’re gonna actually put the afterburner on now instead.’”
When asked to clarify the exact timeline of these conversations, the drummer confirmed that the prospect of retirement was a very recent reality.
“It was recently. It was, like, a year and a half ago. This was gonna be our last record. We had a blueprint for it and everything. We actually had like a whole layout. It was that thick, of going through everything that we were gonna do and how we were gonna do it. And, I mean, I cried a few times thinking about it.”
He went on to explain the heavy emotional toll that the idea of stepping away took on him. Because Sevendust built their massive following through relentless touring rather than major label backing, the group formed an incredibly tight-knit bond with their fanbase. For the drummer, walking away meant losing a vast extended family.
“We’ve had so many people that we’ve met. The Sevendust community is a very close thing. We did not have the luxury of a major label or the major label money, so we grinded it from the beginning and then got really mistreated in the middle of our career, like horribly mistreated. And the people stood there long enough for us to get our legs back, and then when we finally found somebody that really knew that we could trust that knew the game and knew how to make it work, we were so beat up. And the people started coming back a little more and more and more, and it just became this thing where it’s, like, ‘Oh, man. I’ve known these people from being out there so much.’ And when you overtour yourself, you see these people a lot. And they become people you’re going to dinner with or going to lunch with, or having coffee with, or whatever it might be. And you’re doing it consistently. And then one day you’re just, like, ‘We’re gonna wrap it all up.’ And I’m, like, ‘That means they died.’ Because I never see them outside of this. So that means it’ll be like every gig will be another death in the family. It’ll be another group of people that I know from that, and I also know from being around them, and it’s, like, there’s thousands of them. So that’s like a thousand people that you care about dying in a year and a half. So I got really emotional about it, and then when it was decided we’re not gonna do that, I got just rejuvenated. [I didn’t have to] face that now. It got really exciting. I hadn’t felt that kind of, like, ‘I’m ready to break some s**t now. I wanna tear something up.’ And we just got back from a two-month run in Europe, and I felt like it was ’97 again.”
The band’s new album, One, was officially released on May 1 via Napalm Records. To record the project, Sevendust utilized Studio Barbarosa in Gotha, Florida, teaming up once again with producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette. The producer’s extensive resume includes previous collaborations with Alter Bridge and Slash.
