Warrant guitarist Joey Allen recently talked on the ‘On the Road to Rock With Clint Switzer’ podcast about why he doesn’t put any new songs to the band’s setlist.
“The thing is when you’ve got a catalog from way back when, and there’s hits and everything, and everybody’s used the first two records,” he explained. “If you play something completely new, people are like, ‘What’s that?’ And they’re just looking at you like, ‘What’s that?’”
He also wished that people would be more excited about their newer songs: “That’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, when you are onstage looking down [when fans don’t react to new music].”
Warrant’s most recent album is 2017’s ‘Louder Harder Faster.’ The band hasn’t released a new single or an album since then.
“New record? I don’t know,” said the guitarist when asked about the possibility of a new record in another interview. “It’s such an undertaking for us, and the return on making a record is [minuscule]. And not everything’s about money. It’s, like, can we play it live? Well, you can, but people are just gonna sit there and look at you, like, ‘Where’s ‘Cherry Pie’? Where’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’? Where’s ‘Down Boys’? Where are those hits I wanted to hear?’ And so you can’t go out and play three or four or five new tunes, which would be — for me, thumbs up. I would dig to do that.”
“But we have a responsibility to play the songs that people really wanna hear too,” he added. “So it’s a double-edged sword. And that’s what I mean when I [say], what’s in it for us? It’s not financially. The thing in it for us is to play new music, to create new music, to grow. Let’s not be a nostalgia act. So I don’t know if it’ll be a new record or if it’ll be a song at a time or whatever — I’m sure sooner than later something [will] happen — but nothing’s going on right now.”
Warrant has a packed tour schedule for 2024 that goes all the way through December. They will be hitting the road with Firehouse and Great White for a some shows, and they will also do a few gigs with Bret Michaels.