In a new interview with Goldmine, Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott compares the band’s new album, Diamond Star Halos, to “Rumours and Hotel California. They were quantum leaps for Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, retrospectively,” he says. “There was nothing wrong with what came before. I mean, I think the album before Hotel California was Their Greatest Hits, one of the biggest selling albums of all time. And then they came out with Hotel California, and it’s like, ‘Wow!’ And there was nothing wrong with the Jeremy Spencer/Peter Green (era of) Fleetwood Mac. But then you’ve got the booking of Mick’s thing and one album and then all of a sudden Rumours — Boom! It’s a quantum leap!”

Elliott adds: "I think what we’ve done here much later in our career, admittedly, 45 years into it, we’ve come up with an album that it’s still us, but it’s not the more of the same. There’s enough classic Leppard with ‘Gimme a Kiss’ that rocks. ‘All We Need’, ‘SOS Emergency’, ‘Fire It Up’, ‘Kick’ — (with those), people can go, ‘Oh yeah, I’m comfortable with this.’ But then we can go a little left field with’Lifeless’, ‘This Guitar’, ‘Angels’, ‘Goodbye for Good’, even ‘From Here to Eternity’, which is essentially a murder ballad. They’re just a bit different to anything that we’ve really done in the past. We may have done one song like that per album. We’ve done six or seven on this one. We didn’t realize it at the time, but, you know, you have to look retrospectively over the last 18 months of this project. It just became apparent that it was the right thing to do. And considering that Pyromania and Hysteria are 39 and 35 years old, so is our audience and so are we. So we all think that they’re ready to take this journey with us because we’ve all been on this journey, and we don’t wanna necessarily repeat ourselves 100 percent. It suits some bands. I don’t think I’d want to hear AC/DC doing an acoustic song with a piano in it. But with us, we’ve always been a bit more towards Queen when it comes to the diversity of our songwriting. We’re just a bit more behind the eight ball when it comes to the time we did it in. It took Queen four albums, it took us 12. But I’d rather be the tortoise than the hare in this scenario because 45 years into our career, to do what is what we consider pretty much a career-defining record, is quite a statement to make and quite an achievement if I’m right, you know.

Everything about it was organic. Not forced, not, you know, ‘You guys should do this.’ We didn’t have a deal. We made this record for ourselves, to see how it turned out. And we truly believe it turned out better than anybody’s expectations could possibly have been on day one. Day one was giddy excitement at doing this, but it just kept getting better and better as the months rolled on."

Read more at Goldmine.

Def Leppard continue to co-headline the massive 36-city The Stadium Tour with Mötley Crüe, joined by special guests Poison and Joan Jett.

Produced by Live Nation, The Stadium Tour is set to steamroll through North America for the remainder of the summer. Remaining dates are listed below.

August
27 - SoFi Stadium - Inglewood, CA
28 - Petco Park - San Diego, CA
31 - T-Mobile Park - Seattle, WA

September
2 - BC Place - Vancouver, BC
4 - Commonwealth Stadium - Edmonton, AB
7 - Oracle Park - San Francisco, CA
9 - Allegiant Stadium - Las Vegas, NV

Def Leppard recently released a lyric video for "This Guitar" (feat. Alison Krauss), off their new album, Diamond Star Halos. Watch the new clip below, and order the album here.