Rock band Cage the Elephant emerges from loss and hospitalization with new album ‘Neon Pill’

NEW YORK — To say that Cage the Elephant’s latest album had a turbulent birth would be an understatement. The band dealt with the death of loved ones, the pandemic and the lead singer’s arrest and hospitalization.

“It’s no secret that I had a medical crisis,” Matt Shultz told the Associated Press from Nashville on the eve of Friday’s release of the 12-track “Neon Pill.” “I am fully recovered. It definitely left a scar, but it’s a scar that can be avoided.”

In January 2023, the Kentucky-raised singer-songwriter was charged with criminal possession of firearms after police found Shultz’s weapons inside his room at the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan.

Shultz says he later discovered that for the past three years he had been having a negative reaction to a set of prescription medications (Shultz did not specify which ones), leading to episodes of psychosis.

“It’s shocking how night and day it is between taking whatever medication is causing psychosis and not taking it,” he says. “When I stopped the medication, I returned to my normal state. And that was really weird because it was like having your life hijacked by someone else.”

This supposed other person contributed to the five-year recording of “Neon Pill,” and it was up to Shultz — who was hospitalized for two months and had about six months of outpatient therapy — to untangle the song.

“I went back to the lyrics, obviously to finish the album, and it was like reading the words of a totally different person and trying to decode what they meant,” he says. “A lot of it was going back and trying to find the feeling of what I was trying to communicate.”

Shultz avoided prison time by pleading guilty to three gun charges.

“I’m so blessed that it wasn’t worse than it was,” he says. “And blessed to have received the medical care I needed. I’m incredibly blessed to be surrounded by my family, my wife. God definitely helped me get through it, for sure. I would be dead several times over.”

“Neon Pill” sees the band reuniting with producer John Hill, who worked on their latest 2019 Grammy-winning “Social Cues,” and offers a kaleidoscope of rock, from the glam of “Ball and Chain” to the ballad piano of “Out Loud” and the airy alternative rock of “Float Into the Sky”. One song, “Rainbow,” is infectiously poppy, as if Cage had done a Dead or Alive track.

“It was like the culmination of all the Cage records combined,” says Shultz. “John Hill definitely had a bigger impact on this album, for sure. Not that he didn’t have an impact on ‘Social Cues,’ but with this one, he was definitely pushing us even more to reach within ourselves and write the best material we could.”

The album doesn’t shy away from Shultz’s experiences and the title track goes straight to them, with the lyrics “Double-crossed by a neon pill/Like a loaded gun, my love, I lost control of the steering wheel”. The song became the band’s 11th No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart.

“We definitely felt like this was going to be the title track when it all happened,” says Shultz, whose bandmates are his guitarist brother, Brad; bassist Daniel Tichenor; drummer Jared Champion; guitarist Nick Bockrath; and keyboardist Matthan Minster.

Two songs connect to Matt and Brad’s father, Brad Shultz Sr., including “Out Loud,” which is based on the time the elder Shultz and his father had a terrible fight and his father ran away, hitchhiking to Florida. . Feeling regretful after a year, the young man wrote an apology song and returned to Kentucky to play it for his father.

Matt Shultz says he was moved by the story and “so I wrote a song about the song he wrote.” This song has the lines: “Man, I really screwed up now/ I clipped those wings and came home/ I tried my best just to carry on.”

The album’s final track, “Over Your Shoulder,” mourns the death of their father in 2020. The Shultz brothers inherited milk cartons with hundreds of their father’s songs on old cassette tapes. A new original Cage song has emerged, similar to his father’s style, with the lyrics: “Don’t look back over your shoulder/I’m not saying don’t ask/When it feels like it gets colder/Each season will pass.” ”

Matt Shultz says the entire album marks a certain departure for a band who he admits have often in the past worn their influences on their sleeves.

“We would be in the studio and definitely sometimes trying to imitate and emulate. But with this album, I think, we were really relaxed and trying to do something we love.”

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Mark Kennedy is in