ROBERT DELEO Has 'Some Ideas Coming Together' For Next STONE TEMPLE PILOTS Album

During a new appearance on SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk", Robert DeLeo, bassist and principal songwriter of the iconic band STONE TEMPLE PILOTS, was asked if he and his brother, STP guitarist Dean DeLeo, have gotten together to begin work on any music for the group's next release. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Not yet. I'm so busy on [my debut solo] record right now, and it's been such a journey for me to kind of try to tackle this all alone, with playing and everything and with the people I got together. This is just kind of the beginning of promo. The record was released a couple of weeks ago, so I'm kind of in the middle of it right now. But it's in the back of my mind, and I've got some ideas kind of coming together. So we'll see where that goes."

Robert's first solo album, "Lessons Learned", came out on October 21. Robert played virtually all the instruments on the LP, complemented by guest musicians and vocalists. The album's first single, "Love Is Not Made Of Gold", features vocalist Jimmy Gnecco.

DeLeo had been discussing the possibility of releasing a solo album for at least the last two decades. Back in 2002, he said that he was "compiling a number of songs" that had not made their way on to STP records, "not because they're bad songs, [but] just because they never found a place. Though they're different from STP, they still mean a lot to me," he explained.

STONE TEMPLE PILOTS features three original members — the DeLeo brothers and drummer Eric Kretz.

Eight months ago, Eric told Australia's May The Rock Be With You that he and his bandmates were "so disappointed" that they couldn't tour behind their first-ever acoustic album, "Perdida". "And I think in some ways, it was actually very therapeutic just to take a break — just take a break," he explained.

Regarding whether "Perdida" is indicative of STP's future direction or if that album was just a "one-off experimental thing," Eric said: "It was just experimental. I'm sure you know from our catalog, we've always had a song or maybe two that were similar to that. And it was just, 'Let's just do a whole record like that.' And the majority of it we wrote here at my place where I have a studio. We just sat around the couch with a couple of acoustics and some hand drums and just kind of arranged the songs and put the lyrics together and just kind of got it all together. And then recording was sometimes it'd be a few of us together, sometimes it'd be one person at a time or two people at a time, and just kind of developing the layers. And Robert and Dean really had some great ideas with expanding what they wanted to do with the harmonies and melodies and continued to use instruments that we haven't touched on before. So in that sense it was a different avenue for us to take.

"I would say the next record — my guess is it's probably gonna be the hardest and loudest record we've ever had, just to say, 'Okay, we've done that. Now let's do this and let's try something different,'" he added. "Or it could be totally a mixture of the two. We kind of don't know until we get there. In a few more months, like I said, we'll probably be itching to record again."

In 2017, singer Jeff Gutt, a now-46-year-old Michigan native who spent time in the early-2000s nu-metal act DRY CELL, among other bands, and was a contestant on "The X Factor", joined STONE TEMPLE PILOTS after beating out roughly 15,000 hopefuls during an extended search that began more than a year earlier.

Original STONE TEMPLE PILOTS singer Scott Weiland, who reunited with the group in 2010 after an eight-year hiatus but was dismissed in 2013, died in December 2015 of a drug overdose.

Chester Bennington, who joined STP in early 2013, departed nearly three years later to spend more time with his main band LINKIN PARK. Bennington committed suicide in July 2017.

"Perdida" was Gutt's second LP with STP. His recording debut with the group was on its self-titled seventh album, which arrived in March 2018.