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As their band name implies, Skillet is always cooking up something new. They experimented with a variety of sounds on their first five albums until, most recently, they landed on hard rock, the dominant sound on their latest CD, Collide (Ardent). We sat down with the band—singer/bass player John Cooper and his wife/keyboard player Korey, guitarist Ben Kasica; and drummer Lori Peters—and talked about the ever-evolving Skillet sound, a sound that now comes crashing through our speakers as gritty, head-banging hard rock—with a dose of good old-fashioned metal.

From the left: Ben Kasica (guitars), KoreyCooper (keyboards, vocals), John Cooper(vocals, bass), Lori Peters (drums)

With this being your sixth album …

John CooperWhoa! Hey it is!

You've done techno, acoustic, industrial, modern rock, worship, and now more hard core rock. Is there a favorite style, or is this just the evolution of the band?

JohnI enjoy the acoustic stuff the least. [His bandmates strongly agree.] It's cool for a little bit here and there for a change but not too often.

Ben KasicaI like to see other bands doing it, my favorite bands doing their songs a different way. But just not us.

JohnThat was just a side thing for us in the past. It's really not us. For Skillet, it's been about evolving into what we feel we want to do now. The thing is that once you do it, you go head first into it with everything you've got. We do it that way at least.

Our debut album in '96 was basically grunge rock. I just loved it. But after a while, we started to think we should do something else. We got into the electronic stuff, and I remember thinking, This is so much more fun than grunge rock. There aren't any boundaries with electronic music. You can do anything with keywords—well, my wife can, at least. Playing it live was a lot of fun because you've got the whole backbeat thing and the rhythms are pounding.

Korey CooperThere are lots of dynamics in that music.

JohnFor this record, I've been falling back in love with hard rock. And as I now listen to this new album, I can't help but think, This is so much better than our other albums.

I hadn't really liked rock music again until this past year or so. I've been really bored with the hard rock genre of music, you know? I hate rap-core, and that's dominated the music scene for the past two or three years.

So, you grow in phases of what you like to do, and right now I really enjoy playing this type of music. And I haven't enjoyed playing music in a really long time.

Korey CooperHe's an old '80s metal guy, and a lot of that has come back in. Kids think that's something new, while everybody else is like, That's so metal!

BenYeah, if John could get away with being in a heavy metal band, he'd be there in a second.

Lori PetersThat's why I like doing what we're doing now. Not that I didn't like the Invincible-type music. It was fun to play, but I feel like this is more my style. I'm having a real good time playing this stuff.

JohnThe drumming on this record is so much different than our … I interrupted you, Lori—but to brag on you, so that makes it okay! The drums really are so much different than our other albums. It just seemed like Lori could finally go wild on this one.

KoreyThere are tastes of Lori on Alien Youth where she really got into it. But this one is where she's definitely more in her element.

JohnBefore we go on, let me clarify: I'm not saying that this is the music we've been wanting to do, but haven't been. I'm not saying we didn't like the electronic stuff. It was simply an issue of what do we want to try to do now? We continually ask ourselves that as we go into each new album.

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