What is a metal band to do after scoring the highest charting album of their career? If you are The Sword, then you simply let the chips fall where they may, without consciously deciding which direction the music should take. And that is exactly what the lads - John Cronise (vocals, guitar), Kyle Shutt (guitar), Bryan Richie (bass), and Santiago Vela III (drums) - have done on their fifth studio album overall, High Country. Mr. Shutt spoke with BraveWords correspondent Greg Prato shortly before the album's release (out August 21st, via Razor & Tie).

BraveWords: How does High Country compare to previous albums by The Sword?

Kyle Shutt:  "We kind of go for a different experience every time. We've never really made the same record twice. And I felt that with the last one [2012's Apocryphon], we sort of honed the way we do albums down to a science and we did it perfectly, so we really wanted to think outside the box this time. And we took about a year off, because the last two albums were kind of back-to-back, and we were on tour for five years, basically. You've just got to take some time off once in a while. It was also different because when we did Apocryphon, that was kind of all the songs that we had. That was it. We had no more old material. So when we started writing this one, it was interesting to see how the songs were coming about because JD didn't even know if some of the songs he wrote were going to be able to be Sword songs. And he doesn't live in the same city as us now, so it was kind of like we traded demos back and forth over the Internet, which was something that was new for us writing that way. We ended up coming up with a lot of songs. Once we decided it was time to start writing, we had about 18 songs - which is far more than what we normally have. I think one of them got the axe, so we ended up with 17 songs that we recorded. We knew that one of them was going to be a b-side to the first single, and we knew that one of them was going to be a bonus track for the deluxe album. But the other 15 songs, we were thinking, 'What do we do? Do we save four of them?' It was almost like a litter of puppies - we just couldn't get rid of any of them. It was like, 'Nope. These are all ours.' We put every single one of them on there. And it had been three years since we'd made an album, and the first time we'd taken that long to turn around a record, so we wanted to give fans a large body of material to be able to digest for the next tour cycle."

BraveWords: Was it difficult following up Apocryphon, since it was the band's most successful album to date?

Kyle Shutt:  "I don't know if we were planning on just 'following it up.' We were just like, 'There is no way to top it, really, for what it was.' We just wanted to stretch our legs in different directions and honestly, what we wanted to do with this one was do some really different stuff to where it enabled us in the future to do even more different stuff. Because we're always going to put a handful of rockers on there. But it's been really fun just experimenting with different songwriting styles and things like that. I'd like to think that the next one we do is going to combine all the weird stuff that we did on this record and distill it and boil it down to a little more of a concise offering, but it will feature just a little bit of everything, instead of every song being a different flavor. But that's what I love about this album - you can put it on from beginning to end and it's like a journey. Instead of if being like a 45 minute kick in the teeth, there are a lot more ups and downs than what we usually give people in the past."

BraveWords: Does the album title have any special meaning behind it?

Kyle Shutt:  "Not particularly. It was one of the first songs that we had brought to the table. JD wrote that one. For some reason, when we saw the title of the song, we were like, 'That would be a good album name.' We kind of joked that we were 'going country,' because we were holed up in a hotel one night on tour, and the Country Music Awards were on. Just watching all the bands play, we're like, 'We're just as country as this shit!' Dudes with Mohawks and pyro machines going off. It's like, 'This isn't fuckin' country. We're just as country as this shit!' So we just started joking that we were going country. Also, you know we're high, so that's kind of implied! It just felt right. It came about really naturally, really quickly. It was kind of like we knew early on that that was going to be the album title."

BraveWords: How did the video for "Mist And Shadow" turn out so trippy?

Kyle Shutt:  "It was kind of a process. We're not really into spending large amounts of money on just performance videos anymore. We love Jonas Åkerlund - he's done a lot of videos for other artists in the past, like Coheed and Cambria, Madonna, Lady Gaga. And he's been a big Sword fan - he's put us in a lot of his movies, but he just doesn't have the time to make a music video for us. So we're kind of saving our money for when he will be able to do something, because he gets million dollar budgets to do Lady Gaga videos. We spent a lot of money on videos in the past, and we just didn't want to do the same thing again. You're not going to do you or your fans a service by making the same video over and over again. So are just waiting for the guy to do a really crazy, epic video. In the meantime, we've just been doing little trippy…visual videos. You don't even have to pay attention to it really - there's no story. You just put it on and zone out, listen to the song. And also I feel that when there's less action in the video of a plot happening or anybody doing something, it kind of detracts from the music itself - which is what we're pushing right now, to get everybody excited about the album. I've seen a lot of videos where honestly, you don't even remember the song after the video is done, because the video is so entertaining. And that's great. But we're really trying to push the music."

BraveWords: How was it touring with Metallica a few years back?

Kyle Shutt:  "That was a weird time in our career, man, because we literally went from being essentially a little punk rock band in Austin back in '04 and '05, then we got on one tour, we got a record deal, got a record out…and before you knew it, Lars was coming to our shows and partying with us and taking us to his house and going on tour. Within three years, we were on tour with Metallica, playing to 55,000 people in Istanbul and shit. It was just such a crazy trajectory. Coming down off that…I wouldn't say it was hard, it was just difficult to reassess, 'Well, what do we do now? We just did the biggest goddamn tour that took up a year of our lives - over a hundred shows.' But we're still really good friends and see each other whenever we can. It's hard to link up, but it's always smiles and partying. It's all a bit of a blur, but it was a lot of fun. A couple of times, we'd be partying so late that we'd have to leave to make the next show, and they'd say, 'Why don't you fly on our plane, so we can party all night?' They were really generous, really good dudes, and really cared about music and younger, more current musicians. Anybody that has anything bad to say about them is just jealous or misinformed."

BraveWords: What likes ahead for The Sword?

Kyle Shutt:  "We're going to be touring our asses off on this record. I can feel it. There may be some more songs coming out of this High Country session - an acoustic version of one and a different verse on the next one. So there might be a release before the next album even appears, but it's still up in the air. I can see us being on tour for the next two or three years."