New Jersey’s progressive metal masters, Symphony X, just released their new masterpiece, Underworld, was released in July and  guitarist Michael Romeo told BraveWords that his mission is about the songs as a whole, not the flash inside them.

"We were talking about doing different things after eight albums," he says. "The Rush album Moving Pictures came up a lot in conversation because every song on that record is great. Yeah, there's some progressive stuff on Underworld but in the end there are just great songs on the record. The only thing we were really thinking about was trying to not to repeat something we've done. We wanted to do something a little bit different but have the elements of what people know from Symphony X." 

"The goal was for things to be cohesive and to the point, and if the songs catch people off guard, cool. Yeah, we're a progressive band, so there's nothing wrong with putting some measures in 7 somewhere, but we do it without taking away from the songs."

"With every album we do there's tons of stuff left over," Romeo adds. "There's a fucking pile of riffs, melodies and ideas, and at the end I'm saying 'I'll save this stuff for next time and get a head start...' but I've never used the leftovers (laughs). It's because that music was written at a certain time for an album, and Underworld is totally different. Those unused ideas will sit there until the end of time. Underworld has a different feel lyrically and conceptually, there's a different theme, so the music had to be written specifically with that in mind. It would be the easy way out, to rummage through the unused material, but that's cheap."

Read more at BraveWords.