In a new interview with Mexico’s Summa Inferno, EPICA singer Simone Simons spoke about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the follow-up to 2021’s “Omega” album. She said: “At the moment, we have quite a lot of songs for the new EPICA album. And I don’t know if we can even record all of them, but we definitely have a lot of material.

“We recently had another writing camp where the whole band got together to write demos or finish the demos for the songs, come up with vocal lines and some working lyrics,” she revealed. “We have already a whole schedule of the whole recording in the studio, and the album should be done by the end of summer and released in 2025. So, yeah, we are going to have our ninth studio album.

“I love the songs so far that we’ve written,” Simone added. “There’s more songs that have been written than fit on the album. So it’s gonna be cool. And we won’t tour that much this year. So we are focusing on the EPICA album and the ‘Symphonic Synergy’ shows where EPICA will play alongside an orchestra, which is a lot of work.”

Asked about the lyrical themes that will be covered on the next EPICA album, Simone said: “Well, there’s a lot going on in the world, in our own personal lives. The inspiration source is never-ending. And sometimes you feel even inspired by the music itself. When you come up with an amazing vocal line and you try to come up with a lyric that fits beautiful to the melody, sometimes unconsciously things come up and sometimes funny lyrics come up, which we have to change in the end. But Mark (Jansen, guitar/vocals) already told the band about some ideas that he has, some kind of concept or a red line going that would be great to go through basically all the songs. But we are planning end of March to do another little writing session, vocal-line writing session, and then we will make a selection of the songs that we are actually going to record. Yesterday we had a long band meeting. Mark and I are gonna also have a call to see who is gonna write lyrics for which song, and then we can start with that already now these upcoming weeks. And, like always, EPICA writes indeed about topics, spiritual, scientific, philosophical, and that will always be a little bit our… the red line, the red thread going through all the lyrics. And I love the part of writing lyrics and coming up with cool sentences, cool rhymes, beautiful metaphors, so, yeah, that’s always a cool part of the process.”