Inside The Silence, Behind The Screen, The Light Is Dying While Your Soundbites Deafen Me

The Wisconsin part of that story matters to me more than I realized when I first started putting this together. Skillet began in Memphis, but Wisconsin eventually became part of the band’s geography too. Korey is from Kenosha, and John and Korey built their life there. That puts part of Skillet’s story in a place that was already part of mine long before I ever thought about writing thousands of words trying to explain what this band has meant to me.

Kenosha is close enough to where I grew up that Skillet never felt quite as geographically distant as most of the bands I listened to. I am not claiming some personal connection that was not there, and I certainly was not hanging around the Cooper house waiting for the next album. It was simpler than that. This huge band that could tour the world, sell millions of records, and eventually have a song become almost impossible to escape also had roots sitting basically down the road from places that were completely ordinary to me.

Then there is Milwaukee. Summerfest became the place where that hometown feeling stopped being abstract because Skillet kept coming back and I kept seeing them there. The lakefront, the stages, the people I went with, and eventually even that storm in 2007 became tangled up with the records themselves. When I think about different eras of Skillet, I do not only see album covers or release years. A lot of the time, I can put myself back in Wisconsin and remember who was standing beside me when those songs were the band’s current version.

That is why the Wisconsin connection is not really trivia for me. It is part of the perspective I am writing this from. Skillet belongs to everybody who found something in the music, wherever they found it. For me, though, the story has always had this extra layer where a band I followed for years kept crossing through places that already felt like home.

Skillet (1996): Before Anyone Knew The Recipe

Before any of the strings, electronics, dual vocals, giant choruses, or songs that eventually escaped into arenas and sporting events, Skillet sounded like three guys who had been dropped into a room together and were still figuring out what happened when their influences collided. That is basically what they were. John Cooper came from Seraph, Ken Steorts came from Urgent Cry, Trey McClurkin was behind the drums, and the name itself came from the idea that these different pieces were being thrown into the same skillet to see what came out.

The self-titled album arrived in October 1996 after the earlier Right Upside Your Head demo, and listening to it now is almost funny if the Skillet in your head begins with Comatose, Hero, or Monster. The production is smaller. John’s voice is younger and rougher. The guitars sit much closer to the grunge and alternative rock happening around them at the time, and there is none of the polished machinery that would eventually make a Skillet chorus recognizable within about five seconds.

That does not make it some embarrassing prototype they needed to escape. Songs like Gasoline, I Can, Saturn, and My Beautiful Robe already show a band willing to make faith sound restless instead of comfortable. The language is unmistakably Christian, but there is doubt, dependence, frustration, and a lot of searching underneath it. That part never really leaves Skillet. The vocabulary changes, the production gets enormous, and eventually John learns exactly how to build an anthem around it, but the instinct to write from inside the fight is there almost immediately.

I also like the debut more because it doesn’t yet know what Skillet is supposed to sound like. There is freedom in that. Nobody in 1996 could sit down and say a song was or wasn’t “Skillet enough” because there was only one Skillet record, and they were making it. Thirty years later, when the band has such a defined identity that we can argue about whether a new song sounds too safe or whether something like Scream reaches far enough back into the heavier side, this album is a reminder that the identity had to be built before anybody could protect it.

Hey You, I Love Your Soul (1998): Throw Out The Recipe

Two years later, Skillet did something that became one of the most important habits in its history: it changed.

Hey You, I Love Your Soul did not simply polish the grungier debut and send everybody back out for another round. The electronics moved forward; industrial textures began crawling through the guitars; John added more keyboards and programming; and suddenly the band sounded as if it had discovered an entirely different box of tools. The title track, Deeper, Locked In A Cage, Take, and Dive Over In, all live in that stranger space where rock and electronics are learning how much room they can take from each other.

It is also the first album where Korey appears in the Skillet story, contributing background vocals and writing before she officially became part of the band. That matters a lot more in hindsight than it probably looked like on a credit sheet in 1998. Korey eventually becomes so fundamental to how Skillet sounds, writes, produces, and even thinks about itself that imagining the band without her gets difficult. Here, she is just beginning to enter the frame.

What I like about Hey You, I Love Your Soul now is how little fear there seems to be about confusing somebody who liked the first album. Skillet had barely established a sound before it started messing with it. There are still quieter songs and straightforward rock underneath the experimentation, but the record feels curious. That curiosity becomes important because early Skillet is not a straight line toward Collide. It is a band trying things, keeping some, throwing others away, and learning which pieces actually belong.

Invincible (2000): Everything Starts Moving

By Invincible, even the people making the music were changing. Ken Steorts left before the album was released; Kevin Haaland came in on guitar; Korey became an official member on keyboards, programming, and backing vocals; and Trey McClurkin would leave soon after. In the span of a few years, John went from being one-third of the original trio to the only founding member still standing.

The music sounds like it understands that everything is moving. Best Kept Secret is probably the easiest doorway into the album, but You Take My Rights Away, Invincible, Come On To The Future, You’re Powerful, and The Fire Breathes push the electronic and industrial side farther than the previous record had. If the debut sounds like a rock band beginning to experiment, Invincible sounds like the experiment has taken over the room.

There is something else happening here that becomes easy to miss once Skillet’s lineup eventually settles for more than a decade. This band was still remarkably unstable. Members were changing while the sound was changing, and there was no guarantee that the version of Skillet making one record would be the version making the next. Lori Peters would soon take over the drums, which means almost every piece around John had shifted before the band had even reached album four.

And yet Invincible does not sound timid. If anything, it sounds more committed to being weird. That is one of the things I think gets lost when these records are treated only as “early Skillet.” The band people eventually accused of becoming predictable spent its first several albums refusing to sit still long enough for anybody to predict it.

There was also Ardent Worship later in 2000, which sits a little differently from the studio-album progression but still belongs in the history. Skillet took the intensity it had been developing and aimed it directly at worship music, mixing originals with songs from that world rather than treating worship as something that required it to become a completely different band. It is another odd little branch on a family tree that already had plenty of them.

Alien Youth (2001): Something Heavier This Way Comes

Then Alien Youth arrived in 2001 and pushed the whole thing toward its most exaggerated form. John produced the album himself; Lori was now behind the drums; Kevin Haaland left; and Ben Kasica entered late enough in the recording process that his guitar only appears on Earth Invasion. Once again, Skillet was changing personnel while making music about transformation, identity, and refusing to belong comfortably to the world around it.

The title track is almost impossible to mistake for any other period in the band’s history. Alien Youth, Vapor, Eating Me Away, Kill Me Heal Me, and The Thirst Is Taking Over still carry the electronic and industrial ideas that had been building since Hey You, but there is more muscle underneath them. The guitars are getting heavier. John’s delivery is getting more aggressive. The record can still get strange in ways that later Skillet usually does not, but you can hear something beginning to pull the band toward what comes next.

I would not call Alien Youth a rough draft of Collide, because that sells both albums short. It has too much of its own personality for that. What it feels like is the point where all the experimentation of the first few years starts to run into a harder wall. The electronics are not gone. The faith is certainly not gone. The willingness to make a record that sounds different from the previous one is still very much alive. The balance is simply starting to shift.

That is why I think these first four records matter beyond being the albums Skillet made before most people were paying attention. If you jump straight from the origin story to Collide, the heavier turn can look like the moment the band finally discovered itself. I hear something messier and more interesting than that. Skillet had already discovered several versions of itself. Grunge gave way to industrial rock. Electronics became central. Korey entered the picture. The original lineup disappeared piece by piece. Lori arrived. Ben arrived. John started producing. Every time the band thought it had found the formula, something moved again.

Then the guitars got heavier.

It would be easy to rush through those records because they came before the Skillet most people know, but I think that would miss what makes them worth going back to. Early Skillet was restless. Sometimes it was weird. They were willing to follow an idea without knowing whether it would become part of the permanent sound or disappear on the next album, and there is something I love about hearing a band work that out in real time. Modern Skillet is almost ridiculously recognizable. There are songs now where a few seconds are enough to know exactly who made them, but that certainty had to come from somewhere. The early records are where they tried things, abandoned some, kept others, and slowly figured out which pieces still felt like theirs once the experiment was over.

By the end of Alien Youth, they had pushed the electronic and industrial version of Skillet about as far as it needed to go. That did not mean those years were a detour or something the band had to erase before becoming “real” Skillet. They had learned too much from them for that. The next step was figuring out what happened when all of those textures had considerably more weight underneath them.

Collide is where all of that searching finally crashes into something heavier. Released in 2003, the album does not completely abandon the electronics Skillet had spent years working with, but it changes what leads. The guitars move forward. Lori Peters sounds huge behind the drums. John’s voice has more abrasion in it, and Korey’s keyboards, programming, piano, and string arrangements start working around the weight instead of asking the weight to work around them. Ben Kasica was now on guitar, and for the first time, I could listen to an early Skillet record and hear more than just pieces of the band that would eventually follow. I can hear the foundation.

That does not make Collide a clean dividing line between experimental Skillet and modern Skillet. I think the album is more interesting than that. The industrial years are still in there. So is the willingness to let a song get strange, uncomfortable, or darker than the giant motivational choruses Skillet would eventually become known for. What changed was the center of gravity. The electronics were no longer the first thing I noticed. The riffs were.

Forsaken opens the album like it wants to make that point immediately, and Savior follows with one of the first Skillet songs that really sounds capable of escaping the Christian-rock lane entirely. My Obsession, Fingernails, Imperfection, and Cycle Down keep the record from settling into one easy version of heavy, while the title track gives some of that aggression room to collide with the more atmospheric and emotional side they had been building for years. Even A Little More and Under My Skin remind you that Skillet was not interested in making forty-five straight minutes of the same riff just because heavier guitars were suddenly working for them.

Savior probably deserves a little more room than that list gives it, because it became the song that showed just how far this heavier version of Skillet might travel. There is still some of the darkness and abrasion that makes Collide feel different from the records that followed, but the song is considerably easier to grab onto than some of the band’s earlier experiments. The riff hits immediately, John sounds absolutely pissed off, and underneath all of that weight is the kind of direct hook Skillet would eventually become frighteningly good at writing. I don’t think Savior sounds like somebody accidentally wrote a Comatose song three years early. It is too raw for that, and Collide deserves to have its own identity. But if I had to hand somebody one song and say, this is where you can hear the next version of Skillet starting to show itself, Savior would be pretty high on the list.

I also think Collide is where Korey’s importance is easier to hear if you know what to listen for. She was not simply standing behind a keyboard while John wrote the songs and everybody else filled in the empty spaces. Her fingerprints were increasingly all over the architecture of the music, from programming and keyboards to piano and strings, and that becomes important when you know what is coming next. The cinematic side of Comatose did not appear out of nowhere. Skillet was already learning here how something heavy could sit beside something orchestral without either one canceling the other out.

Then the outside world started paying a little more attention. Collide was originally released on Ardent before Lava Records, part of the Atlantic world, picked it up and reissued it for a broader market, adding Open Wounds to the record. Savior crossed into mainstream rock radio, and the album eventually earned Skillet its first Grammy nomination. None of that made them an overnight mainstream band. Monster was still years away. What it did prove was that the heavier version of Skillet could travel outside the audience that had already been following them.

That matters to me more than treating the label move or Grammy nomination as a trophy we need to stop and admire. Skillet had already spent years changing almost everything around John and Korey. They had gone from alternative and grunge to industrial electronics, changed guitarists and drummers, and made four albums without settling into a single obvious formula. Collide was the first time all of that movement started pointing somewhere instead of simply pointing somewhere new.

There is also a rawness to Collide that Skillet would never fully recapture, even when they went heavy again. The production on Comatose would become bigger and more cinematic. Awake would make the choruses more immediate and introduce the John-and-Jen contrast that changed everything. By comparison, Collide still sounds like it has dirt under its fingernails. The guitars grind instead of simply exploding at the right moment; John sounds less polished, and the whole record carries some of the uncertainty of a band that has finally found solid ground but has not yet figured out how large it can build on it.

I like that version of Skillet. Not because I think they should have stayed there forever, but because you can hear the moment when years of experimentation stop sounding like separate phases and start becoming tools they know how to use. The electronics did not have to disappear. The melodic side did not have to disappear. The faith certainly did not disappear. They finally had enough weight beneath it all for the different pieces to stop fighting for control.

There are successful albums, there are breakthrough albums, and then there are records that permanently change what people think a band is capable of. Comatose did that for Skillet. The strange part is that it happened ten years and six albums into their career. By the time it arrived in October 2006, Skillet had already been alternative, industrial, electronic, heavy, melodic, and several combinations of those things. They had changed members, changed labels, and spent most of a decade figuring out what belonged. Comatose is where all of that movement finally sounds less like searching and more like knowing.

The heaviness from Collide was still there, but Skillet did not simply make Collide Part Two. The strings got bigger. Keyboards and programming moved back into the picture without taking the guitars out of it. Piano could sit beside something crushing and somehow make the whole thing feel heavier emotionally, rather than softer. Korey’s fingerprints were everywhere in the keyboards, programming, piano, backing vocals, and arrangements; Ben Kasica was on guitar; Lori Peters was still behind the drums; and John’s voice had grown into something that could sound wounded, angry, desperate, and hopeful without any of it feeling forced. This was not Skillet choosing between everything they had been. It was the first time they sounded completely comfortable being all of it at once.

There was also considerably more pressure underneath the songwriting than I understood at the time. Working with Brian Howes meant John was having songs and lyrics pulled apart in a way he had not really experienced before. Tiny choices mattered. Lines got questioned. Songs that probably would have been considered finished on an earlier record kept getting worked until there was nowhere obvious left to hide. Ten years into being Skillet, John was willing to let somebody challenge material that was personal to him because Collide had already shown what could happen when he stopped protecting every first instinct just because it was his.

I think you can hear the payoff in how little wasted space there is on Comatose. This is one of those albums where naming the songs almost becomes ridiculous because eventually you realize you are naming most of the record. Rebirthing. The Last Night. Yours To Hold. Better Than Drugs. Comatose. The Older I Get. Those Nights. Falling Inside The Black. Whispers In The Dark. Even when the songs are doing different things, there is a consistency to the world around them that Skillet had never managed quite this completely before.

Rebirthing is probably the clearest possible way to open that record. It does not ease anybody into the new version of Skillet. The strings arrive like they have always belonged there, the guitars still have the weight Collide earned, and the chorus reaches for something much larger without losing the urgency underneath it. If Collide was Skillet discovering how heavy they could become, Rebirthing sounds like them realizing heaviness did not have to mean shrinking everything else around it.

Then The Last Night goes somewhere completely different without leaving that same world. It deals with self-harm, isolation, and reaching somebody who has convinced themselves there is no reason to stay. That is heavy in a completely different way than a guitar riff is heavy, and I think it says a lot about where Skillet’s writing had gone by this point. They were still writing from faith, but the doorway into the song was human pain. You did not have to believe exactly what John believed to understand what it meant to need someone to stay with you when your own head had become a dangerous place to be alone.

That shift matters because Comatose is where Skillet became considerably harder to keep within a single audience. They had already started moving in that direction on Collide, writing more directly about things people were actually living through rather than assuming every listener shared the same faith. Comatose takes that much further. The belief underneath the songs is still unmistakably Skillet, but fear, loneliness, damaged relationships, regret, addiction, longing, and the need to feel alive are not experiences owned by one group of people.

Yours to Hold gives the record room to breathe without making it feel small. Better Than Drugs takes dependence and desire and turns them into something huge enough to sit beside the heavier songs. The title track feels desperate in a way that became one of Skillet’s best tricks, making the desire to wake up and feel something sound almost physical. Then The Older I Get strips the fight down to damaged relationships, distance, and the realization that time passing does not automatically fix what happened between two people.

That last part is another reason I think this album has aged as well as it has. Some of these songs hit differently once you have enough years behind you to understand that time and healing are not the same thing. You can get older without getting over something. You can understand another person better and still know the relationship is never going back to what it was. You can forgive something and still carry its shape. Comatose leaves more room for that kind of mess than the giant choruses might make you expect.

Those Nights might be the clearest example of the personal becoming universal. John pulled it from a genuinely awful stretch of his own life after losing his mother as a teenager and ending up in a home situation he hated. What survived from that period were the nights spent with a close friend, staying up, talking, watching television, and having somewhere emotionally safer to exist for a while. You do not need to share the exact circumstances for that to make sense. Most people who have made it far enough through life can probably name a person, a room, a car, a phone call, or some stupid late-night conversation that mattered far more than anyone involved realized at the time.

I think that is part of why the song belongs so naturally beside everything else on Comatose. The album keeps coming back to connection as something that can pull a person out of whatever darkness they are sitting in. Sometimes that connection is explicitly spiritual. Sometimes it is another person refusing to let you disappear. Sometimes it is memory. Skillet had written about faith from the beginning, but by this point they had gotten much better at explaining why someone might need it in the first place.

And the record still is not done. Falling Inside The Black brings the darkness right back to the surface. Say Goodbye slows everything down without losing the ache underneath it. Whispers In The Dark comes ridiculously late in the track list for a song that could have carried plenty of other albums by itself, which might be the best argument for how deep Comatose actually is. By the time Looking For Angels closes, Skillet has spent eleven songs moving between personal damage, faith, relationships, isolation, desperation, and hope without making the album feel like eleven separate ideas fighting for space.

That is what I mean when I say the songs still hold up as one hell of a list. It is not just that several became popular. The album has depth. There are records where the singles tell you almost everything you need to know, and then there are records where you start listing favorites and realize you have accidentally named most of the track list. Comatose is the second kind for me.

The whole thing has this dramatic sweep to it that probably should have been too much. Strings. Programming. Heavy guitars. Piano. Huge choruses. John’s rasp. Korey’s backing vocals. Songs about addiction, self-harm, broken relationships, faith, memory, and trying to wake yourself up before life passes by. On paper, there are plenty of places where that could have become bloated. Skillet committed to it so completely that it worked. The strings were huge because the songs felt huge. The choruses opened up because everything underneath them had earned the release. Even when the album reached for hope, it never acted like the darkness had suddenly packed up and left just because the music found a way through it.

That is probably what makes Comatose feel like the album where Skillet fully became Skillet. The rougher weight of Collide was still there. The electronics from the earlier records had finally found a better purpose. The cinematic side stopped feeling like another experiment and became part of the foundation. Korey’s role had grown with the music; John had become a better, more vulnerable writer; and the band finally had enough confidence to make all of those things enormous at the same time. Comatose did not erase everything Skillet had been before it. It finally showed how it all could fit together.

On July 3, 2007, my cousin and I went to Summerfest in Milwaukee to see The Fold and Skillet. They were playing the Zippo Rock Stage right in the middle of the Comatose era, and at the time that was really all I needed it to be. I loved the record, we were going to see them play, and I certainly was not standing there thinking about where that night might fit into a thirty-year history that did not exist yet.

Then the weather went to hell while Skillet was playing. A storm moved through, which honestly feels about right for a band whose live show has never exactly been built around keeping things calm. I could not reconstruct every minute of the show now if I tried, and I do not want to pretend I can. What survived is the feeling of being there, hearing those Comatose songs with an actual storm around them, and then getting to meet the band afterward.

That was a big fucking deal to me then. We got pictures and autographs and actually met John, Korey, Lori, and Ben instead of watching them disappear backstage and calling it a night. Then we got the Fourth of July fireworks on top of everything else because apparently seeing Skillet in a storm and meeting them afterward still was not quite enough. I do not remember the exact setlist without looking it up. I remember my cousin being there, the weather, meeting the band, and the fireworks. My brain apparently decided those were the parts worth keeping.

There is another layer to that memory now because I know what came next. In 2007, Lori Peters was still behind the drums, Ben Kasica was still on guitar, and the John-and-Jen vocal dynamic that would eventually become one of the easiest ways to recognize Skillet had not happened yet. Nothing about that night felt like an ending, because it was not one to me then. I was watching Skillet play songs I loved with my cousin beside me. The meaning changed later as the story progressed.

That is where my relationship with Skillet becomes more interesting to write about than simply listing albums I owned. From this point forward, the band’s changes start lining up with places I was actually standing. I saw the Comatose lineup in 2007 and met that version of the band. I came back to Summerfest the next year and somebody different was sitting behind the drums. Another year passed, and I was there again. Then Awake arrived, and the band I had already been watching suddenly became something much larger.

Comatose: Still Breathing

Comatose also did not really end when the original album did. By 2008, Skillet had enough life left in that era to expand in two directions, and both suggest why this record became such an important dividing line in the band’s history.

The Comatose Deluxe Edition added Live Free Or Let Me Die along with acoustic versions of Rebirthing, Yours To Hold, The Older I Get, Whispers In The Dark, and Say Goodbye. I like the attached acoustic versions on this particular record because Comatose is remembered for how enormous it sounds. The strings, guitars, electronics, and John’s voice can make the whole thing feel as if it were built for a stage before you ever see one. Pulling some of that away exposes how much of the record still works when the machinery is not doing all of the lifting.

Live Free Or Let Me Die goes the other direction. It does not calm anything down. It sounds like something that could have lived comfortably beside the heavier parts of Comatose, which makes it one of those bonus tracks that feels less like leftover material and more like another piece of the era. That is really what I want from an expanded edition. Give me something that makes the world around the original album a little bigger rather than just asking me to buy the same record again.

Then Comatose Comes Alive captured what all of this had turned into onstage. Recorded at the Tivoli Theatre in Chattanooga on May 9, 2008, the live album and DVD draw heavily on Comatose but also reach backward, bringing Collide, Forsaken, My Obsession, Savior, and even Best Kept Secret into the same set. It is almost a snapshot of Skillet standing with one foot in the band it had been and the other in the band it was becoming.

There is another reason that release matters now. Comatose Comes Alive became the first Skillet release with Jen Ledger behind the drums. Lori Peters had stepped away earlier that year, and suddenly the songs that had defined one lineup were being performed by the lineup change that would help define everything after it. Jen was still brand new. Nobody listening to that release in 2008 could know that she would still be there nearly two decades later, singing some of the band’s biggest songs while becoming every bit as recognizable a part of Skillet as the people who had been there before her.

That makes Comatose Comes Alive feel less like a victory lap to me than it otherwise might. It documents the end of one version of Skillet while inadvertently introducing the next. Comatose had already changed the scale of what the band could sound like. The live release showed what that scale looked like in a room full of people, while the person sitting behind the drums quietly pointed toward the next chapter.

There is also something kind of funny about sitting here all these years later writing toward an EP called After The Storm when one of my earliest Skillet memories involves watching them play through one. I am not going to pretend the weather over Milwaukee in 2007 somehow predicted music that would not exist for another nineteen years. It rained at a rock show. That is all it was.

It is still a pretty good coincidence.

What I could not have known that night was that the version of Skillet I had just met was almost finished. Lori Peters told the band later that year that she was ready to come off the road, played her final show with them on New Year’s Eve, and even helped train her replacement before she left. I like that part of the story because lineup changes are usually reduced to somebody leaving and somebody else arriving, as if there is a clean cut between the two. This one actually had an overlap. Lori helped hand the drums to the next person.

That next person was Jen Ledger, an eighteen-year-old drummer from Coventry, England, who had moved to Wisconsin at sixteen to study drums. She was stepping into songs from Comatose while that record was still growing, replacing a drummer who had played on Alien Youth, Collide, and Comatose. Before Hero or Awake and Alive made her voice part of the band’s identity, Jen had to walk into an existing machine, play Lori’s parts for audiences who already knew them, and prove she belonged there. All the hindsight that makes her feel inseparable from Skillet now did not exist yet.

I got to see that transition almost immediately. On July 1, 2008, I was back at Summerfest with Shep and my youngest brother for 12 Stones and Skillet. A year earlier, I had watched Lori play and then met that lineup after the show. Now Jen was behind the kit. I was not there conducting some before-and-after comparison in my head. It was another Skillet show. That is what makes having both memories so cool now.

Then Shep and I went back again on June 28, 2009, for 12 Stones and Skillet. By that point, Jen was no longer simply learning somebody else’s songs. Skillet was moving toward the first studio album she would help define, and the thing nobody could have heard in 2007 was about to become impossible to separate from the band.

Her voice changed the equation. John Cooper already had one of those voices you recognize almost immediately: rough, heavy, and usually sounding like whatever he is singing about has already taken a swing at him. Jen could cut through that rasp without softening it, giving a song two sides of the same fight. Skillet already had the strings, electronics, heavy guitars, and enormous choruses from Comatose. Her voice became one of the last major pieces of the modern Skillet sound.

That is why those 2008 and 2009 Summerfest shows mean more to me now than two more dates on a list. In 2007, I saw Lori during the Comatose era. In 2008, I saw Jen while she was still brand new. In 2009, I saw the band right before Awake arrived and introduced that version of Skillet to a ridiculous number of people who had never been there for any of the earlier ones. None of us standing there knew we were in the middle of a transition that would eventually look this important. We were going to Summerfest because RED, 12 Stones, and Skillet were playing, and that sounded like a pretty fucking good day. The history came later.

If Comatose was the album where all the earlier versions of Skillet finally came together, Awake was the record that found out just how far that version could travel. There was pressure underneath it before anybody heard a note. Comatose had changed the expectations around the band, which meant following it was no longer simply a matter of making another Skillet record. John wrote dozens of songs while they worked toward the album, Howard Benson came in to produce, and for the first time Skillet was making a record knowing there was a much larger audience waiting to see what came next.

They did not respond by reinventing themselves. That is important. For most of the first decade, evolution meant turning hard enough that the next record could almost sound like another band. Awake takes the opposite approach. Skillet had finally found something on Comatose that felt completely theirs, so instead of running away from it, they tightened it, made parts of it heavier, made other parts more immediate, and built songs that could get to the chorus without sacrificing the drama that had made Comatose work.

And now Jen was not simply playing Lori’s songs on tour. This was the first Skillet studio album with her behind the drums, and more importantly, it was the first time the band could build songs around the thing they had discovered after she joined: she could sing. That changed more than adding another voice to the background. It gave John somebody to answer him.

Hero makes that obvious almost immediately. John and Jen trading vocals gives the song movement that would not exist if either one carried the whole thing alone. His voice sounds battered and confrontational. Hers cuts through it. The song is still unmistakably Skillet, still built around struggle and the need for something outside yourself to pull you through, but the contrast makes the fight feel like it is happening between perspectives rather than only inside one person.

Then Awake and Alive takes that idea and makes it enormous. The strings connect it directly back to Comatose, the guitars keep the weight underneath it, and Jen’s voice adds another dimension before John comes crashing back in. It is one of those songs where all the things Skillet had spent years collecting finally sound like they belong to the same language. Heavy guitars, orchestration, programming, male and female vocals, faith, defiance, and a chorus designed for thousands of people to yell back at the stage. None of those pieces were new on their own. The combination was.

That is part of what makes Awake such an interesting album in their history. It is not their most adventurous record. I would argue several earlier albums take bigger risks. It might be the record where Skillet became best at communicating exactly what they wanted to be, though. There is less distance between the idea and the song. Hero sounds like a song called Hero should sound. Awake and Alive sounds like standing back up. Never Surrender does not make you work particularly hard to understand what is being refused. That directness would become a huge part of modern Skillet, for better and occasionally for worse, but here it felt like the band discovering just how powerful clarity could be.

The rest of the album matters too, because reducing Awake to the three giant songs makes it look more one-dimensional than it actually is. Don’t Wake Me is built around loss and the desire for the dream, because waking up means confronting what is gone. One Day Too Late turns toward time and the uncomfortable realization that there is always a point where “later” stops being available. Should’ve When You Could’ve sits in the wreckage of a relationship with considerably more bite than the title might suggest. Believe and Forgiven slow the record down without stepping outside the emotional world around it, while Sometimes lets some uglier self-awareness into an album people often remember mainly for empowerment.

I like that messier side of Awake because the singles became so big that they can distort the memory of the record. If all you remember is Hero, Monster, and Awake and Alive, the album can start to look like forty minutes of Skillet telling you to get up and fight something. It is not. There is regret in there. There is grief. Some relationships do not work. There is guilt and the fear of wasting the time you have. The giant songs opened the door, but there was still a person standing behind it.

Commercially, the door did not just open. Somebody ripped the damn thing off the hinges. Awake debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, easily the biggest opening Skillet had ever had, and suddenly a band that had spent more than a decade building an audience in overlapping Christian and rock spaces was sitting near the top of the main album chart. That does not happen because everybody collectively decided to appreciate their long-term artistic development. It happens because the songs escaped.

And one of them escaped farther than anybody could have reasonably expected.

Some songs become hits, and then some songs eventually become bigger than whatever album, era, or audience they started inside. Monster became the second kind. The funny part is that John did not seem to know that was what he had when they made it. Skillet had been around long enough by then to have songs they thought might be the one that broke through, only to watch them find a ceiling. Monster was not supposed to become a permanent part of the band. Then that riff started playing, and apparently nobody bothered to tell the song what its limits were.

Musically, it is almost brutally efficient. There is no long introduction asking you to settle in. The riff announces itself, John comes in, and less than three minutes later the whole thing is over. Skillet had spent years learning how to combine electronics, heavy guitars, drama, melody, and giant choruses, but Monster strips that language down to something almost impossible to misunderstand. It sounds dangerous before you know what John is singing about, and once the chorus arrives, you know exactly what the fight is.

What keeps it from being nothing more than a great riff attached to a huge hook is the thing underneath all of that noise. The monster is internal. It is the part of yourself you do not trust, the thing you keep hidden because you are afraid of what happens if somebody sees it, and the fear that whatever you have locked away might eventually become stronger than the version of you standing in front of everyone else. Skillet had written about darkness before, but Monster gives it a face simple enough for almost anybody to recognize.

That simplicity mattered. You did not need Skillet’s history to enter the song. You did not need to know Collide, understand the faith underneath John’s writing, remember Lori Peters, or have any idea that Jen Ledger had recently joined the band. You did not even need to know what Skillet looked like. If you had ever felt like there was a version of yourself you were trying to keep under control, the song gave you somewhere to put it.

Then popular culture got hold of it and basically refused to give it back.

Wrestling found it. Sports found it. Gaming found it. Television found it. Rock radio found it. Monster was used for WWE’s Hell In A Cell, landed alongside Hero in WWE SmackDown Vs. Raw 2010, made its way into Rock Band, and became exactly the kind of song that could play over somebody running onto a field, stepping into an arena, or getting ready to beat the hell out of somebody on a screen. None of those uses required an explanation of Skillet’s Christian-rock history. The song worked before anybody had time to ask where it came from.

That is the part of crossover people sometimes flatten into chart numbers. Yes, Monster reached the upper end of mainstream rock radio and pushed Skillet farther into alternative and active-rock spaces than they had been before. Those numbers matter because they show the scale changing. What matters more to me is what the numbers represent. People were encountering Skillet accidentally. They were hearing them while wrestling, playing a video game, watching sports, or catching the song on a station that didn’t ask whether they normally listened to Christian rock first.

That changes the relationship between a band and its audience. Before a song like Monster, somebody usually has to find the band. Afterward, the band starts finding people.

There is a weird side effect when that happens, because the breakthrough can start rewriting the history that came before it. For a ridiculous number of people, Monster became the beginning of Skillet. I understand why. If that was the first song you heard, the band arrived sounding fully formed: John’s rasp, the heavy guitars, electronics beneath everything, a chorus built for an arena, and a message direct enough to grasp on the first listen. You would have no reason to know how many versions of Skillet had to exist before they could make something that sounded that certain.

That is why I keep coming back to the earlier records in this post rather than treating them as trivia we had to get through before reaching the famous stuff. Monster does not happen without all of it. The alternative band from 1996 is in there somewhere. So are the industrial experiments, the electronic years, the heavier turn on Collide, the cinematic scale of Comatose, Korey’s programming and keyboards, John’s years of figuring out how directly he could write, and a band that had already learned several different ways to make darkness sound enormous. By 2009, all of those lessons had been compressed into a song under three minutes long.

And then it just kept living.

That might be the strangest part from where we are standing now. Plenty of songs are massive for a year or two and then slowly become attached to the period that made them famous. Monster never really stayed in 2009. New listeners kept finding it long after Awake had stopped being Skillet’s current record. Streaming gave it another life, then another one after that. By 2026, it had surpassed 4 billion global streams and entered Spotify’s Billions Club, while the single itself had reached 6-times Platinum in the United States. At that point, calling it a successful Skillet song almost feels comically inadequate.

It became one of those songs that can introduce a band to people who were not old enough to remember when it came out.

I have a different relationship with it because I did not meet Skillet through Monster. I already had years with them by the time it arrived. I had heard the records that led into Comatose. I had stood at Summerfest in a storm in 2007, met John, Korey, Lori, and Ben afterward, and then watched Jen take over behind the drums across the next couple of summers. When Monster started showing up everywhere, I was not discovering Skillet. I was watching a band I already knew suddenly become much harder for everybody else to miss.

There is something genuinely fun about that. Not in a “I knew them before you did” way, because who the hell cares when somebody found a song they love. Music is not improved by making people pass an entrance exam. What was fun was knowing how much road sat behind this apparently overnight breakthrough. Skillet had already been doing this for thirteen years. They had already made seven albums. They had already changed sounds, labels, guitarists, drummers, and probably more parts of themselves than anybody standing in an arena hearing Monster for the first time had any reason to know.

The song also made the “Christian band” question considerably less useful. Skillet had not stopped being Christian. John had not hidden what he believed, so the song could get onto mainstream radio. The faith remained part of the band and part of the larger record. Monster simply worked on a level where the listener did not have to share John’s theology to recognize the emotion. Fear of yourself is not denominational. Shame is not. Anger is not. Trying to keep the worst thing inside you from deciding who you are is not.

That is where I think Skillet found the crossover version that actually lasts. They did not become less themselves so everybody else could understand them. They got better at finding the part of what they were writing about that everybody else already understood.

By 2010, you could see the result happening in real time. Awake was still a new record. Monster was still a current single rather than the song everyone knew would be waiting somewhere in the set forever. Jen was still establishing what her voice and drumming meant to this version of the band. The thing that looked inevitable from 2026 was still happening.

I got to see that lineup more than once while Awake was still current, which is something I appreciate more now than I probably did at the time. On June 26, 2010, Shep, Matt, and I were back at Summerfest for RED and Skillet. By then, this had become a familiar rhythm. Summerfest rolled around, some combination of bands I already listened to ended up on the schedule, and somehow Skillet kept being one of them. I had seen them there in 2007 with my cousin, in 2008 with Shep and my youngest brother, in 2009 with Shep, and now here we were again.

The difference was what had happened around the band since the previous summer. Awake had arrived. Hero was everywhere. Monster was turning into something none of us could have understood the scale of yet, and Awake and Alive had given John and Jen another song that made their vocal contrast feel less like a new trick and more like part of Skillet’s identity. The band standing on that Summerfest stage was the same one I had watched the year before, but the world around them had gotten noticeably bigger.

I think that is one of the things I remember most about following a band through a stretch like this. There is rarely a single clean moment when you can point and say, “That is when everything changed.” You notice it in pieces. The crowd knows another song. The reaction gets louder. Somebody who never talked about the band before suddenly knows Monster. A record starts showing up in places the older ones never did. Then one day you look around and realize the band you’ve been seeing for years is playing to a lot of people who just discovered them.

Less than two months later, on August 15, 2010, I saw them again at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park, Illinois, with Creed and Theft on the Full Circle Tour. I went with Shep and my brother, and it was my first time at the venue. That show has always been connected to Creed in my head for obvious reasons, and if I ever build the Creed story out even further, it belongs there too, but Skillet absolutely earned their part of that memory.

They killed it.

There really isn’t a more complicated way to say that. I had already seen Skillet enough times by then that they no longer had the benefit of novelty. I knew what they could do live. I had watched them through different lineups and records, and they still went out there to open for Creed and played like they had something to prove. That has always been one of the things I appreciate about them. Skillet’s music is built big, and live they have always seemed happiest when they can make it even bigger.

Then Creed came on and somehow managed to top it.

I have seen Creed more than once, and that Tinley Park show is probably the best Creed show I have seen, period. That makes the whole night kind of ridiculous in retrospect. Skillet came out and absolutely delivered, and then Creed followed with the best performance I can remember from them. There are concerts where one band is clearly the memory and everybody else becomes part of the setup. That was not this one. I remember the night because both bands gave me something worth keeping.

There is a fun connection between the two stories now, too. Creed and Skillet occupy very different lanes in my music history, but that night puts them in the same place at the same time. One band was in the middle of a comeback with Full Circle. The other was in the middle of the biggest expansion of its audience yet. I did not go to Tinley Park thinking about any of that. I went with Shep and my brother to see two bands I liked play a show. Fifteen-plus years later, I have written enough about both of them that the overlap feels much more interesting.

It also gives me a pretty clear snapshot of what Skillet had become by 2010. This was not the band I had met after Summerfest three years earlier, even though John and Korey were still standing at the center of it. Jen had become part of the identity. Awake had changed the size of the audience. Monster, Hero, and Awake and Alive were current songs rather than permanent pieces of the set everybody expected to hear. Seth Morrison had not joined yet, so even the lineup I was watching still was not quite the one that would carry Skillet through the next decade and beyond.

That last part is easy to lose when a lineup eventually becomes stable for an extended period. Looking backward, John, Korey, Jen, and Seth feel like Skillet because that version has lasted so long. In 2010, though, the band was still moving. Ben Kasica was still on guitar. Jen had only been there a couple of years. Awake had only been out for about a year. The version of Skillet that now feels permanent was still one more change away.

What had already become permanent was the way these shows were attaching themselves to people in my life. My cousin was there in 2007. Shep kept showing up across the years. My brothers were part of different nights. Matt was there for Summerfest in 2010. These were not concerts happening in isolation from the rest of my life. They became markers inside it, and Skillet happened to keep being onstage while the people beside me changed from one year to another.

That is probably why I remember the shows differently from the records. Albums preserve the band. Concerts preserve everybody else too.

That live side of Skillet is worth hanging on to because it explains something the records alone never fully do for me. Skillet has always made more sense once there is a stage underneath the music. The size of the production, the drama in the songs, and choruses that can occasionally feel almost too large through headphones suddenly have somewhere to go when thousands of people are standing in front of them. John makes it seem like the people in the back are just as involved as those pressed against the stage. Korey has never felt like somebody quietly filling space beside him. Jen somehow makes singing while beating the hell out of a drum kit look like a completely reasonable thing to do. The music gets bigger because it finally has somewhere big enough to live.

That was the version of Skillet I carried into the next few years. The breakthrough was no longer happening. It had happened. Monster was not going anywhere; Hero and Awake and Alive had established Jen as more than the new drummer, and the question was shifting from whether Skillet could become that big to what they were going to do now that they were.

That distinction matters because I think Rise is where the story of Skillet’s evolution changes again. Seth Morrison joined on guitar in 2011 after Ben Kasica left, completing the lineup of John, Korey, Jen, and Seth, which would become the band’s longest-lasting lineup. Considering how much movement there had been around John and Korey during the first half of Skillet’s career, that stability is almost its own chapter. Jen was no longer the new drummer. Seth was not simply the next guitarist passing through. For the first time, the lineup itself was starting to feel as settled as the sound.

That is the Skillet I saw at Summerfest in 2012, even though Rise was still a year away. Awake had already done the impossible part. It had taken the band from successful to enormous, and Monster was well on its way to becoming something Skillet would probably be playing for the rest of its life. Following that kind of record is a strange problem to have. You can chase the breakthrough and risk making a weaker copy of it, or you can run so far away from what worked that everybody wonders why you abandoned the thing they loved. Rise mostly refuses both choices.

When the album arrived in 2013, Skillet was no longer trying to figure out what a Skillet song sounded like. That question had been answered. Instead, Rise took the language they had built through Comatose and Awake and tried to make an entire record feel like it belonged to the same larger fight. Fear, pressure, anger, resistance, faith, and survival keep crossing from one song into another. The record has connective pieces between tracks, news reports and voices bleeding into the music, and a loose narrative running underneath it about growing up in a world that seems determined to convince you everything is already falling apart.

The title track makes the intention pretty clear. Rise is not subtle, but subtlety has never really been Skillet’s favorite weapon. It starts in chaos and keeps pushing toward the idea that whatever is happening around you does not get to decide who you become. That sounds familiar because it is. Skillet had been circling that idea for years. What changed here was the scale around it. Instead of one song fighting one monster, the whole album feels like it is looking at a world full of reasons to give up and answering them all at once.

Sick Of It takes that frustration and makes it considerably more aggressive. There is less wounded introspection in it than something like The Last Night and more of the feeling that you have finally heard enough. Then Not Gonna Die turns resistance into one of the biggest songs on the record, with the strings and theatrical production pulling directly from the Comatose side of Skillet while the chorus belongs completely to the post-Awake band. It is basically both eras occupying the same song.

That is probably why Not Gonna Die has stuck with me as one of the clearest bridges across Skillet’s career. The orchestration could live on Comatose. The directness belongs to the band that made Awake. Jen’s presence is no longer something worth pointing out as a new ingredient, because by 2013 the John-and-Jen contrast was simply part of Skillet. Seth’s guitar gives the lineup another kind of permanence underneath all of it. Nothing about the song feels like the band searching anymore. It sounds like four people who know exactly what they are supposed to do together.

Then American Noise does something I wish modern Skillet gave itself permission to do a little more often. It gets quieter. The song is still built around surviving the pressure around you, but it does not need to turn every emotion into a fist in the air. There is exhaustion in it. There is the feeling of trying to hear yourself think while everything around you keeps getting louder. That idea lands differently beside the giant songs because it reminds me that resistance is not always screaming louder than whatever is coming at you. Sometimes it is finding enough quiet to remember who you were before everybody else started telling you who to be.

Salvation gives Jen even more room vocally, while Madness In Me closes the record by turning the conflict back inward. That is important because for all the outside noise running through Rise, Skillet never completely leaves the monster behind. The world can be chaotic, people can hurt you, systems can fail you, and life can put plenty of weight on your shoulders, but there is still the question of what happens inside your own head once all of that gets there. Skillet keeps returning to that because the external fight and the internal one have never really been separate in their music.

Not Gonna Die is especially interesting to hear now that Lift Me Up exists because the same refusal is still there more than a decade later. I do not hear that as Skillet simply writing the same song again. Some things do not get solved once and politely stay out of your way forever. Fear changes shape. Shame finds a different way to talk. The past can go quiet for a while and still know exactly when to show up again. Skillet has returned to those battles for years because people keep coming back to them too.

What changed after Rise was not really the subject matter. It was how settled the band became in the way it delivered it. The early records had been defined by experimentation. Collide and Comatose were about discovering how the pieces could fit. Awake proved how far that combination could travel. Rise feels like the point where Skillet stops asking what the next version of itself should be and starts asking how many different things it can say in a language it already knows fluently.

Three years later, Unleashed would push that confidence about as far as it could go.

Then Unleashed arrived in 2016 and pushed that confidence about as far as it could go. If Rise was Skillet realizing it no longer needed to reinvent itself every few years, Unleashed sounds like the band deciding there was no reason to apologize for knowing exactly what worked. The electronics move farther forward again, the choruses are built to be enormous almost by default, and the whole record carries considerably less uncertainty than the Skillet albums from a decade earlier. This is not a band searching for an identity. It is a band walking into the room, already knowing which parts of itself people will recognize.

Feel Invincible is probably the clearest possible introduction to that version of Skillet. The electronic pulse starts pushing before the guitars have even fully arrived; John sounds like the fight began somewhere before the first verse, and then the chorus opens up exactly the way a Skillet chorus tends to when it has absolutely no intention of staying inside a pair of headphones. There is a reason the song translated so naturally to sports, wrestling, gaming, and all the other places Skillet music had already learned how to travel. It sounds like somebody should be walking into an arena while it plays.

That could make the song easy to dismiss as Skillet simply manufacturing another anthem after Monster, but I think the difference matters. Monster is afraid of what is hiding inside you. Feel Invincible starts after the fear has already taken its swing. The song is not really pretending you cannot be hurt. It is about finding what makes you feel capable of getting back up anyway. That distinction runs through a lot of Unleashed. The battles are familiar, but the posture has changed.

Back From The Dead is considerably less interested in nuance. The title tells you exactly what the song plans to do, and then Skillet spends the next few minutes doing it loudly. I mean that affectionately. There are times when the directness of modern Skillet works because the band understands that not every idea needs to be buried underneath six layers of metaphor. Sometimes you survived something that was supposed to finish you; you are still standing, and subtlety can take the afternoon off.

Then Stars reminds me why reducing this era to motivational arena rock is not completely fair. It pulls the production back, gives the record more space, and lets the faith underneath Skillet come through without needing to turn it into another battle cry. I think albums like Unleashed need songs like that because otherwise all of the defiance starts competing with itself. If every song is trying to be the moment where somebody throws both fists into the air, eventually your arms are going to get tired.

Lions sits somewhere between those sides, while Out Of Hell and Burn It Down bring some of the aggression back. Watching For Comets gives the record another melodic turn, and Saviors Of The World reaches for the cinematic scale that had been part of Skillet since Comatose. The album is more varied than its biggest single might suggest, even if all those songs now fit within a much more clearly defined Skillet framework than they would have ten years earlier.

And then The Resistance closes the standard album by taking basically every piece of modern Skillet and turning the volume up. It is defiant, theatrical, heavy, electronic, and built around a chorus that sounds slightly ridiculous until you hear thousands of people yelling it back. That is something I think gets lost when people talk about Skillet only in terms of the records. Some of this music is designed for the stage so completely that judging it only through headphones is like reviewing fireworks in a well-lit room.

By this point, John, Korey, Jen, and Seth had also become something earlier versions of Skillet rarely had the chance to be: settled. Seth had been there since 2011. Jen was nearly a decade into the band. The lineup was no longer changing with every other album, and that stability gave Skillet room to refine rather than rebuild. There is a trade hiding inside that, of course. Early Skillet was unpredictable because the band was still trying things on. By Unleashed, there was no mistaking who you were listening to. You knew the chorus was probably going to get enormous, you knew the guitars would eventually open up, and you knew John and Jen could give the same song two completely different kinds of force when the arrangement called for it.

I understand why some people miss the uncertainty of those older records. I do too, sometimes. There is something fun about moving from the grungier debut into industrial electronics, watching that turn into Alien Youth, and then having Skillet suddenly put considerably more weight underneath everything on Collide. Modern Skillet does not surprise me in quite the same way because eventually the experiments became a vocabulary. The electronics, strings, heavy guitars, giant choruses, John’s rasp, Jen’s voice, Korey’s programming, and the constant push between darkness and getting back up stopped being ingredients they were testing and became the recipe.

I am not sure surprise is the only way a band can keep evolving, though. At some point, knowing who you are has to count for something too. Unleashed feels like Skillet testing the opposite of the question that defined its early career. Instead of asking how much it could change and still remain Skillet, the band was finding out how far it could push a recognizable sound without losing what people connected to.

I saw them at Summerfest again on July 9, 2016 with Shep and Matt, less than a month before Unleashed was released. That timing means the album had not technically become the next chapter yet, but the show was already full of it. Feel Invincible, Back From The Dead, and Stars were all in the set before the album itself arrived, mixed in with Whispers In The Dark, Forsaken, Awake and Alive, Hero, Comatose, Monster, and Rebirthing. I was basically watching the next version of Skillet get folded into the history I already knew in real time.

By then it had been nine years since that stormy 2007 show with my cousin. I had watched Skillet through the end of the Lori Peters era, Jen joining the band, the explosion of Awake, Seth completing the lineup, and the years when songs like Monster stopped feeling new and started feeling permanent. The band standing onstage in 2016 was bigger, more settled, and much easier to recognize than the one I had met after that first Summerfest show.

They were not the only ones who had changed. I had seen Skillet with my cousin, Shep, both of my brothers, and Matt over the years, and each of those shows attached the music to another part of my life. I do not need to turn that into some giant lesson to understand what it means. Time passed. The band changed. The people around me changed. I changed too.

That is what happens when you follow music long enough. The recording stays exactly where it was left, but the person returning to it does not. I can still put on Comatose and hear the same songs I heard in 2007, but I cannot completely recreate who I was while standing in that storm or put everyone who shared those later shows with me back in exactly the same place. The songs stayed where they were. None of us did.

That might also be why I have never been particularly bothered by Skillet’s musical evolution becoming less dramatic after Awake. The band had already spent years earning the pieces it eventually kept. Unleashed is probably the point where that confidence becomes impossible to miss, and depending on what you want from Skillet, that can be either its strength or the beginning of the criticism that would follow the band through the records after it.

By the time Victorious arrived three years later, the question was no longer whether Skillet had a recognizable sound. It was what happened when a band became so good at being itself that predictability could start sitting right beside consistency.

Unleashed Beyond: There Was More To Let Loose

Unleashed did not quite end with The Resistance, either. A little more than a year later, Skillet came back to the record with Unleashed Beyond, and this was more than the usual deluxe edition built around a couple of remixes. Five new songs were added to it: Breaking Free, Stay ’Til The Daylight, Brave, You Get Me High, and Set It Off, along with new versions of Feel Invincible, The Resistance, and Stars.

The one that has always stood out most to me is Breaking Free. Putting Lacey Sturm alongside John Cooper feels almost unfair when you think about the voices involved. Flyleaf and Skillet occupied so much of the same world for me during those years, but Lacey does not show up here as some novelty guest vocal tucked into the background. Her voice gives the song an entirely different edge. John already sounds like he is fighting his way out of something, and then Lacey comes in sounding like she might tear the rest of the walls down herself.

It also fits Unleashed almost too perfectly. That entire record had been built around movement, resistance, survival, and refusing to stay down. Breaking Free takes those ideas and strips away some of the arena-sized polish around them. There is something more desperate and confrontational underneath it, which is probably why it never felt like a leftover song that happened to miss the original album. If anything, it feels like one more side of what Skillet was trying to say during that era.

The rest of Unleashed Beyond matters for the same reason. Brave pushes directly into the fear-versus-faith territory Skillet has returned to throughout its career, while Stay ’Til The Daylight, You Get Me High, and Set It Off stretch the album in different directions without making it feel like a completely different record. Even the film version of Stars, recorded for The Shack, shows how easily one of the quieter songs from Unleashed could survive being pulled away from the larger rock production around it.

By the time Unleashed Beyond arrived in November 2017, though, something else was beginning to happen around the edges of Skillet. The four people in the band were still very much Skillet, but Jen Ledger and Seth Morrison were about to show what they could build when they stepped outside it.

There is another part of 2018 that matters here because Skillet was not the only place the people in Skillet were figuring out what they could do next. Jen had already spent a decade growing from the nineteen-year-old drummer who stepped into an impossible position into one of the most recognizable pieces of the band. Then LEDGER gave her somewhere to find out what happened when she was not standing behind John at all.

The six-song LEDGER EP arrived in April 2018 with Not Dead Yet leading the way, and I think it is easy to undersell what that represented if we treat it like a random solo project between Skillet albums. Jen had already become a vocalist inside Skillet, but this put her voice, her writing, and her own battles in the center. Korey was heavily involved in helping develop the project, John appeared on Warrior, and Jen was able to build something that belonged to her without the story becoming that familiar rock-band cliché where a side project means somebody is halfway out the door.

If anything, LEDGER makes Jen’s place in Skillet more interesting. She did not need to stop being the drummer to prove she could front something herself, and she did not need Skillet to shrink so she could grow. Songs like Not Dead Yet also carry some of the same language of fighting through fear that runs throughout Skillet, but it lands differently coming from Jen because it belongs to her experience rather than simply giving John another voice in one of his songs. By then she was not the replacement for Lori Peters, the young drummer everybody wondered about, or even just the person singing the other half of Hero. She had become an artist with enough identity of her own to step out front and still come home to Skillet afterward.

A few months later, John and Seth pulled in almost the opposite direction with Fight The Fury. Their Still Breathing EP arrived in October 2018, with John and Seth joined by guitarist John Panzer III and drummer Jared Ward, and it gave John somewhere to put music that was heavier, rawer, and less interested in fitting the shape Skillet had grown into. My Demons had apparently been sitting with him for years before the project finally existed, and the five-song EP leaned much harder into metal, screaming, aggression, and some genuinely dark subject matter.

That makes Fight The Fury especially useful in this story because it shows that John had not stopped wanting to make that kind of music just because Skillet had become more polished. Modern Skillet had a sound, an audience, and expectations around both. Fight The Fury gave him a place where none of that had to be the first consideration. He could make something heavier because he wanted it to be. Seth could go there with him. Nobody had to pretend Skillet itself suddenly needed to become a metal side project to prove the heavier part of its history still existed.

And I love that both of these things were happening around the same time Skillet was working toward Victorious. Jen was testing what happened when she stepped farther into the spotlight. John and Seth were testing what happened when they stepped farther into the heavy side. Korey helped shape LEDGER while still building Skillet with John. The main band did not fracture under any of it. Everybody got a little more room, brought those experiences back, and Skillet kept moving.

And 2019 was not only about another Skillet album. Around the same time Victorious was becoming the next chapter musically, the band took its world somewhere it had never gone before with Eden: A Skillet Graphic Novel. John had grown up loving comics, so this was not some random piece of merchandise with the band’s logo slapped across the front. He helped create the original story; Z2 Comics built it with writers Alex Paknadel and Dan Watters and artist Chris Hunt, and John, Korey, Jen, and Seth were turned into characters inside a post-apocalyptic Skillet story.

The premise almost sounds like somebody took themes Skillet had been writing about for years and finally gave them panels. John and Korey are trying to protect their family and community in a broken future; Seth becomes an ex-soldier, Jen is a cyborg, and the story keeps circling redemption, sacrifice, perseverance, faith, and finding light when the world around you has gone dark. None of those ideas are exactly strangers to a Skillet record. Eden just gave them another format to live in.

I think it belongs in this history for that reason. By 2019, Skillet had become big enough that the band was no longer defined solely by albums and concerts. There was an entire visual identity and mythology around them that could stretch into a 144-page graphic novel and still feel connected to the same thing. That is a long way from three guys in Memphis throwing different musical influences into a skillet because nobody knew what else to call the band.

It also makes the timing around Victorious a little more interesting. Jen had just proven she could step out front with LEDGER. John and Seth had gone heavier with Fight The Fury. Then all four members could turn into fictional versions of themselves and go wandering through the end of the world together. Apparently, being settled did not mean everybody had stopped looking for other places to play.

By the time Victorious arrived in August 2019, Skillet knew exactly what worked for them. I had actually seen the first glimpse of that era a month earlier, when I was back at Summerfest on July 6, 2019, for what became my eighth Skillet show. Legendary was already in the set before the album was released, sitting beside songs from basically every version of modern Skillet I had watched develop: Whispers In The Dark, Hero, Awake and Alive, Comatose, Monster, Rebirthing, and the Unleashed songs that had been new the last time I saw them there. By then I was not watching another reinvention so much as watching a band with enough history to carry several eras onto the same stage.

You could hear a few seconds of Legendary, Save Me, or the title track and know who made it. There was no version of the identity crisis that had driven the early records, and I do not mean that as an insult. John, Korey, Jen, and Seth had been together long enough that the lineup itself had become part of the sound. The question was no longer whether Skillet could make another enormous rock record. They obviously could. The more interesting question was whether they could keep making music within that recognizable framework without turning it into a cage.

There was also a different kind of confidence behind the album. John and Korey took the reins for the bulk of the production themselves, something they had never done to this extent on a Skillet record. After years of outside producers helping push the band through major turning points, Skillet was increasingly comfortable putting its own hands on the controls. That feels appropriate for this stage of the story. The early records are full of a band figuring out where its edges were. By 2019, John and Korey had enough history to know exactly where those edges lay and enough confidence to decide when to push against them.

Legendary does not spend much time worrying about any of that. It comes through the door already convinced. The electronics pulse underneath it, the guitars arrive exactly where you expect them to, and John sings like he has been handed four minutes to convince somebody to stop wasting their life. It is modern Skillet distilled almost to its purest form, which is probably why it worked so naturally as a single and eventually became a theme for WWE Raw. It is direct, huge, easy to understand, and built for the moment in a live show when the lights go everywhere, and nobody is supposed to remain seated.

That confidence runs throughout Victorious, but the album gets more interesting when it lets some cracks show. You Ain’t Ready and Never Going Back keep the defiance turned up, while This Is The Kingdom pulls the record toward the faith that has always been underneath Skillet, even when the songs were crossing into places where nobody cared what label was attached to the band. Reach opens things up melodically, and Terrify The Dark gives the album one of its more reflective moments instead of trying to make every song win through sheer force.

Then there is Save Me, which is probably the song I come back to most when I want to push back against the idea that modern Skillet only writes motivational fight songs. It is darker, more desperate, and considerably less interested in pretending the person inside it already knows how to win. The whole point is that they need help. That might sound obvious from a song literally called Save Me, but I think the distinction matters when so much of Skillet’s later catalog is remembered through words like invincible, legendary, victorious, resistance, and surviving.

Those words can make the music look like it starts after the hard part is over. Skillet has always been more interesting to me when the songs remember that survival usually begins while everything still feels like shit. Save Me does. It sounds trapped rather than triumphant. There is fear in it, frustration, and the sense that whatever is happening internally cannot simply be punched until it goes away. That puts it closer to the emotional territory of Comatose than the surface of Victorious might make you expect.

Anchor matters for almost the opposite reason. It pulls the size back and lets dependence sit in the middle of a record whose title suggests it has everything under control. I like that contradiction. A song about needing something steady belongs on Victorious because victory in Skillet’s world has never really meant becoming untouchable. It usually means knowing what you reach for when you are not.

Finish Line brings the arena side roaring back, while Back To Life is a much better closer than it sometimes gets credit for. By the time that song arrives, the record has spent most of its runtime moving between certainty and the reasons somebody might need that certainty in the first place. Ending on the idea of being pulled back toward life gives the album somewhere more human to land than simply stacking one more victory speech on top of everything that came before it.

The title track works for the same reason. Victorious is not really interesting if victory means nothing ever got to you. Skillet’s entire catalog argues against that. The people in these songs are constantly hurt. They lose people, lose control, doubt themselves, get angry, get scared, and occasionally sound like they are one bad night away from falling completely apart. Victory, in Skillet’s language, has usually meant that none of those things got the final word.

I think that is also why I am more forgiving of the repetition in this era than I would be with some bands. Yes, Skillet keeps returning to fear, faith, anger, isolation, resistance, and getting back up. I can see the pattern. I am writing thousands of words about the pattern. There are absolutely moments where I wish they would trust themselves enough to get stranger again, let a song stay uncomfortable longer, or resist turning every difficult emotion into something designed to fill an arena.

But people repeat themselves too.

We do not deal with fear once at twenty-two and then cross it off the list. We do not survive one bad relationship and become permanently immune to being hurt. Faith can be strong one year and complicated the next. Grief can disappear for months and then walk back into the room because a song, a smell, a date, or some completely stupid little thing opened the door. The fact that Skillet keeps writing about the same fights does not bother me automatically, because most of us keep having versions of those fights.

What matters is whether the band can still find a slightly different place to stand inside those fights. Victorious does that often enough for me. It is not Comatose, and I do not need it to be. It is not about capturing a band as it discovers what it can become. It sounds like people who have already survived enough to know that getting through one thing does not mean life politely stops sending more.

Stability gives you confidence. It also creates expectations. By this point, people knew what they wanted from Skillet, though their definitions were sometimes completely contradictory. Some wanted another Comatose. Some wanted the heaviness of Collide. Some found the band through Monster and wanted that rush again. Other listeners had grown attached to the John-and-Jen vocal dynamic, the orchestration, the electronics, or the giant motivational choruses. Twenty-plus years of history meant every new Skillet record was competing with several different versions of Skillet at once.

I think that is a much harder place to make music from than it looks. When a band is young, nobody has a fifteen-year-old favorite album waiting to be used as evidence that you used to be better. Once you have enough history, every new song arrives carrying all the old ones behind it. Victorious does not escape that comparison, and I do not think it should. It does, however, sound like a band comfortable enough with its own history that it no longer needs to run from it.

Victorious: The Aftermath: Victory Wasn’t The End

Victorious was not finished when Back To Life ended, either. In September 2020, Victorious: The Aftermath expanded the album from twelve songs to twenty, adding Dead Man Walking, Sick And Empty, and Dreaming of Eden alongside Victorious – Soundtrack Version, Legendary – Destiny Remix, and reworked versions of Save Me, Reach, and Terrify the Dark.

The three new songs are the reason the expansion matters to me. Dead Man Walking fits naturally into Skillet’s long obsession with coming back from whatever was supposed to finish you, but it has enough bite to keep it from feeling like somebody simply changed the title on Back From The Dead. Sick And Empty is darker and more worn down, giving the era another moment where the person inside the song sounds considerably less victorious than the album title promises.

Then there is Dreaming Of Eden, which had already existed around the edges of this era through the Eden graphic novel before becoming part of The Aftermath. That connection makes it feel less like a bonus track pulled from a drawer and more like another piece of the larger world Skillet was building around Victorious. It also gives the expansion a different kind of ending, one built around longing for something better after watching things break rather than simply declaring that the fight has already been won.

The alternate versions do something useful too. Save Me and Terrify The Dark were already two of the songs where the original record let its guard down, and reworking them only makes that vulnerability easier to hear. That is what I like about these expanded editions when they work. They do not need to rewrite the album. They can turn it slightly and let you see a side that was already there.

Of course, The Aftermath arrived in a year when the word “aftermath” suddenly carried considerably more weight than anybody involved could have planned for. Victorious should still have had plenty of road underneath it. Instead, the world stopped, stages went dark, and an album built to become enormous in front of people had to keep living while the people were stuck at home.

Then the world changed in a way no album cycle could have planned for.

For years, I could mark different Skillet eras by where I had seen them. Summerfest in 2007, then 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2016, and 2019, plus that 2010 night with Creed in Tinley Park. Eight shows across twelve years, seven of them on the Summerfest grounds. Different records, different people beside me, different versions of the band. Then live music itself disappeared for a while. That gap belongs in this story too because sometimes the thing that makes you realize how much something has become part of your life is having it suddenly become unavailable.

Skillet did what a lot of bands had to do: kept moving without the usual machinery around them. They stayed connected online, worked on music, and eventually started building the record that would become Dominion. By the time touring began finding its footing again, the world they were returning to did not feel exactly like the one Victorious had entered in 2019. People were exhausted. Angry. Divided. Afraid. Everybody seemed to have spent two years being told what the other half of the world was doing wrong, usually through a screen.

That is a pretty combustible environment for a Skillet record.

Dominion arrived in January 2022, sounding like a band with no interest in easing back into the room quietly. If Victorious was largely about surviving the fight, Dominion sounds more confrontational about who gets to control what happens after it. Even the title carries more force. This is not simply endurance. There is ownership in it, resistance, and the insistence that fear, pressure, institutions, other people, or whatever else is bearing down on you does not automatically get authority over your life.

Surviving The Game was the obvious first shot. It is unmistakably modern Skillet, with electronics beneath the guitars, John sounding as if he is already halfway through a fight when the song begins, and a chorus designed to turn survival into something physical. The title could almost be accused of being too perfectly Skillet at this point. Of course, the band that made Not Gonna Die, Feel Invincible, and Victorious eventually made a song called Surviving The Game. The important part is that by 2021, survival did not feel like an abstract theme anybody needed explained.

Standing In The Storm pushes that connection even harder for me now, especially because I cannot hear that title without my brain wandering all the way back to Summerfest in 2007. Those things have absolutely nothing to do with each other historically. Skillet did not write the song about the weather at a show I happened to attend fourteen years earlier. Still, this entire post keeps finding these little accidental circles. I watched Skillet play through an actual storm during the Comatose era, and all these years later, one of the songs that defines this stage of their career is about refusing to be moved by one.

The difference is that Dominion does not stay in attack mode the entire time. Refuge is one of the songs I think the album needs most, because it turns away from control and resistance toward a need for somewhere safe to land. That vulnerability matters. Skillet is at its best for me when strength and dependence coexist in the same person, because that feels considerably closer to how people actually work. You can fight like hell and still need somewhere to fall apart. Those things are not opposites.

Valley Of Death gives the album another darker turn, while Beyond Incredible, Destiny, and the title track keep the scale enormous. There is no point pretending Skillet suddenly became restrained during the pandemic. They did not. If anything, Dominion often sounds like a band making up for lost space. These are songs built to get out of a room and back onto stages.

Dominion: Day Of Destiny: The Fight Wasn’t Finished

Dominion got its own second life in 2023 with Day Of Destiny, and like the expanded editions before it, the interesting part is not simply that the track list got longer. Crossfire, Psycho In My Head, Finish Line featuring Adam Gontier, Unbreakable Soul, and The Defiant gave the era another stretch of new material rather than treating the deluxe edition as a place to park a couple of remixes.

Psycho In My Head is the song that interests me most in relation to the longer Skillet story because it takes us right back inside the person again. After all the language about dominion, survival, storms, and standing your ground, the threat is still capable of coming from your own head. The battlefield can get as large as Skillet wants to make it, but eventually they keep returning to the same uncomfortable place they found years ago with Monster: sometimes the thing you are fighting knows everything you know because it lives with you.

Then Finish Line gets an interesting second life of its own by bringing Adam Gontier into a song that originally belonged to Victorious. There is something fitting about Skillet reaching back into the previous album cycle while extending the current one, especially with a voice as recognizable as Adam’s. The expanded edition becomes less of a clean appendix to Dominion and more like the edges of these eras beginning to overlap.

Crossfire, Unbreakable Soul, and The Defiant fit comfortably into the larger language of the record, but that is not necessarily a criticism. By this point, Skillet was not using deluxe editions to audition a completely different identity. They were extending an era that already knew what it wanted to say and giving a few more sides of that fight somewhere to live.

I like that connection because it keeps Dominion from becoming a simple story about Skillet responding to a chaotic world by yelling louder than it. There is plenty of yelling. This is Skillet. Nobody came here expecting a whisper record. Underneath it, though, the old tension remains. What can the world do to you, what can you do back, and what happens when the part causing the most trouble is already inside?

That became even clearer to me as the Dominion era continued. Songs like Surviving The Game, Standing In The Storm, Refuge, and Psycho In My Head all sit comfortably inside territory Skillet knew well by then, but the world around those ideas had changed. There was usually something pressing against you in a Skillet song. After 2020, a lot more people knew what it felt like to have the entire world seem like the thing doing the pressing.

There is another part of the Dominion era that I do not think I can honestly leave out, even if it is considerably messier than talking about riffs and album cycles. John was becoming much more outspoken publicly by then, especially around faith, culture, politics, free speech, and what he believed was happening inside Christianity itself. None of that appeared from nowhere in 2022. Skillet had never hidden its faith, and John has never exactly been difficult to understand when he believes something. What changed was how much of that conversation began happening outside the songs.

During the pandemic, he had more time, more frustration, and increasingly more places to put it. His Cooper Stuff podcast became a much larger part of his public identity. He released Awake & Alive to Truth in 2020, then Wimpy, Weak, and Woke a few years later. By the time Dominion arrived, interviews about a Skillet album could move pretty quickly from the record into government authority, cancel culture, Christianity, cultural change, and the things John believed Christians needed to be willing to say out loud.

That context matters because Dominion was written inside it. John described the record as more rebellious and anti-establishment than anything Skillet had done before, but his idea of rebellion was still rooted in faith rather than simply being angry at whoever happened to be in charge. The title itself came back to the question of who ultimately has authority. You can hear that without needing every listener to arrive at the same political conclusion John does.

I think that distinction is important because it would be very easy to flatten this part of the story in either direction. I could pretend none of John’s public commentary exists and keep the whole thing safely inside the albums, which would not be particularly honest. I could also turn several years of Skillet history into a referendum on whether I agree with every opinion he has expressed, which would make this a completely different post than the one I set out to write.

I do not need either extreme.

There are things John has said publicly that people strongly agree with, things other people strongly disagree with, and probably plenty of listeners who have had to decide how much any of it affects the way they hear Skillet. That is part of what happens when the person at the front of a band stops letting the music be the only place people encounter his worldview. The audience no longer has only the songs to interpret. They have interviews, podcasts, books, social media, and hours of John explaining exactly what he means.

For some fans, that probably strengthened the connection. For others, it complicated it. Some undoubtedly walked away. I imagine plenty stayed in the much less dramatic middle, where you can listen to somebody’s music without requiring them to agree with you about every subject on earth. That is where I think this story becomes more interesting than the question of whether John should have spoken up or shut up. He decided to speak, repeatedly, knowing it could cost him people.

And Skillet kept getting bigger anyway.

That is worth noting because there was a point earlier in the band’s career when conventional wisdom suggested that being too openly Christian could put a ceiling on how far Skillet could go in mainstream rock. John has talked about being advised to distance himself from that identity to achieve greater success. He did not. The strange result is that Skillet eventually became enormous without resolving that contradiction. They could play alongside mainstream rock bands, land songs in sports and wrestling, attract listeners who did not share their faith at all, and still have a frontman who became more explicit, rather than less, about what he believed.

That tension had existed for years, but during Dominion it moved much closer to the center of the conversation around the band. I do not think you have to like that development to understand why it matters. Skillet had spent decades learning how to make songs broad enough for almost anybody to enter while keeping the belief underneath them intact. John was now doing almost the opposite outside the music. He was narrowing the ambiguity and telling people exactly where he stood.

There is an interesting contradiction in that too. The songs can still create a room where people who disagree about almost everything sing the same chorus together. John himself has talked about concerts as one of the few places where people with completely different politics, religions, and backgrounds can still stand side by side and share something. I like that idea considerably more than pretending music has to become another place where everybody checks credentials at the door.

So I am not going to do that here.

John’s public voice is part of modern Skillet. So is the fact that millions of people who do not necessarily share every part of his worldview still listen to the band. Both things can exist at once. By the time Dominion had run its course, Skillet had reached a point where the bigger question was becoming less about whether the outside world accepted every part of them and more about how much control they wanted over what happened next.

The answer to that question eventually became one of the biggest structural changes in Skillet’s history. After roughly 20 years with Atlantic Records, the contract ended, and the band chose not to sign another major-label deal. I think that distinction matters. This was not Skillet getting tossed out of the system and trying to figure out what to do next. John has spoken positively about Atlantic, the people they worked with, and what those years did for the band. If they wanted another traditional label situation, they could have pursued one. They decided they were finally ready to see what happened without it.

There is a pretty wild full-circle quality to that when you put it beside the beginning of this story. Early Skillet had freedom because nobody yet knew what Skillet was supposed to be. They could move from alternative rock into industrial electronics, change the lineup, push the programming harder, then turn around and make Collide because there was no thirty-year catalog sitting behind them telling everybody what the rules were. By 2024, the band had the exact opposite kind of freedom. Everybody knew what Skillet sounded like. More importantly, Skillet knew too.

John’s explanation for going independent was refreshingly practical. After that long, they understood their audience. They knew what people came to Skillet for; they knew which risks felt like theirs to take, and they were tired of how slowly a major-label system could move when every decision had to travel through another set of hands. He has talked about writing a song and recording it days later, instead of waiting for the machinery of an album cycle to catch up. For a band that had sometimes gone three or four years between records, that kind of speed was not a small change.

Hear It Loud was not created from nothing for this moment. John and Korey, along with longtime manager Zach Kelm, had already built the imprint years earlier and used it with projects connected to the Skillet world. What changed was its scale. Instead of existing underneath Atlantic, Hear It Loud became the structure Skillet could use to release and market its own music. The band was not leaving one machine just to walk into another one with a different logo on the door. They were taking considerably more responsibility for the machine themselves.

That is why Revolution matters to me before we even get into whether every song works. It is Skillet’s twelfth studio album, released in November 2024, but it is the first one where independence is part of the record’s DNA. The title almost feels suspiciously convenient when you line everything up, except the revolution was not that Skillet suddenly wanted to burn down the sound it had spent decades building. The bigger change was who got to decide what happened with it.

And apparently that freedom put some energy back into the process. Instead of writing piles of material and slowly reducing it to an album, they wrote and recorded a much tighter group of songs they actually wanted. John could write on the road when something hit him. Korey could produce. They could go back to longtime collaborators like Brian Howes without the entire project feeling like it had been assembled by committee. For a band this far into its career, independence did not mean learning how to make a record without help. It meant deciding whom they wanted to help.

You can hear some of that looseness in the album. Unpopular is a strange little lead single by Skillet’s standards, with almost a smirk underneath it. It still has the weight and electronics that modern Skillet naturally uses, but it is not trying to be Monster: Part Two or another life-or-death survival anthem. The whole thing has more swagger than desperation. After years of John becoming more willing to say exactly what he thinks outside the music, something is fitting about Skillet opening its first independent record by basically shrugging at the idea that everybody needs to approve of them.

That does not mean I hear the entire album as some political declaration, and John has explicitly pushed back on that interpretation of the title. The revolution he has described is rooted in faith, love, hope, and refusing to let a culture he sees as increasingly empty decide what matters. You can agree with all of his diagnosis, some of it, or none of it and still hear the larger idea running through the record: if you believe something matters, eventually you have to decide whether you are willing to stand there when standing there becomes inconvenient.

All That Matters puts that idea right on the surface through faith, family, and freedom, while Ash In The Wind brings considerably more weight. That song is one of the moments on Revolution when I hear the band reaching backward without turning completely around. There is something rougher in it, something that reminds me why people who still carry Collide and Comatose around have spent years asking Skillet to let the guitars get mean again. It is still a modern Skillet song, but the edges feel less sanded down.

Fire Inside Of Me scratches a similar itch from a different direction. The drama is still there, the modern production is still there, but it has more of that older tension underneath it. Then Defector keeps the defiance moving, while Not Afraid lives comfortably within the language Skillet has spent years building around fear, refusing to let it decide for you.

The record also makes room for something much more personal with Happy Wedding Day (Alex’s Song), which John wrote for his daughter. I like having a song like that sitting on an album called Revolution because it complicates the easy version of what that title could mean. Revolution does not have to be a fist, a flag, or somebody screaming at the world. Sometimes the thing that matters enough to stop everything else is your daughter getting married and realizing a part of your life is changing, whether you are ready for it or not.

That range is what keeps Revolution more interesting to me than the independent-label headline by itself. Skillet did not use freedom to become unrecognizable. If anything, the album sounds very aware of Skillet’s thirty years. The arena songs are still there. The electronics are still there. John’s voice is still John’s voice. Jen still gives the band another weapon whenever her vocals come to the fore. Korey’s fingerprints are all over the music’s construction, and Seth has been part of this lineup long enough that nobody is talking about him as the new guitarist anymore.

What independence seems to have changed is the band’s relationship with its own instincts. They could move faster. They could keep a song because they loved it, not because enough people in a chain agreed it belonged. They could let something feel a little nostalgic without worrying that looking backward meant they had stopped moving. After decades of growing recognition, that kind of freedom might actually be more useful than another dramatic reinvention.

That does not mean every choice works equally well, and it certainly does not mean anyone has to love every version of Skillet simply because the band has been around for a long time. I have records I return to far more than others, too. There are still moments where I want modern Skillet to leave a bruise instead of immediately turning the pain into an anthem. There are still times I miss the unpredictability of the early records. Independence does not magically erase any of that.

What it does change is who gets to make the call.

That feels like a pretty important place for Skillet to arrive nearly thirty years into the story. The band started without a clear identity, spent years finding one, became successful enough that the identity became an expectation, and eventually reached the point where it could step outside the system that had helped turn those expectations into a global career. Atlantic mattered. The years there mattered. Comatose, Awake, Rise, Unleashed, Victorious, and Dominion all happened inside that relationship. Leaving does not require pretending those two decades were some prison Skillet finally escaped.

It can simply mean that the relationship did what it was supposed to do.

I can understand how Revolution might look like a natural ending when everything is lined up from a distance. Twelve studio albums. Nearly three decades. A lineup that had remained stable after all the movement early on. The first independent album after roughly twenty years with Atlantic. That is usually where people start talking about legacy and writing, like the story has reached the point where everything can finally be explained.

That is not where Skillet is, though. They had finally taken more control over how the next part of the story would be made, and then almost immediately started proving why that mattered.

Then Scream showed up, making the timing of this post even more interesting.

There is something almost too perfect about Skillet reaching this point in its story and immediately releasing a song that sounds less comfortable than a lot of what came before it. Revolution was the first real statement of independence, but Scream feels like one of the first places where I can hear what that freedom might actually let them do. It is still unmistakably Skillet. John is still John, the electronics are still there, and the chorus still knows exactly how big it wants to become. The difference is that some abrasion has worked its way back into the edges.

That caught my attention almost immediately because one of the things I have kept coming back to throughout this post is how polished modern Skillet became. I do not think polished is automatically bad. You do not accidentally spend thirty years learning how to make records and somehow become worse because you know what you are doing. There are moments, though, where I miss the feeling that a Skillet song might scrape against something instead of smoothing every difficult emotion into an arena-sized answer.

Scream scrapes. It starts with cleaner guitar before the distortion swallows the space around it, and the production keeps pulling between restraint and something considerably uglier trying to break through. The electronics do not disappear, but they feel more nervous here. The guitars have more weight. Even the quieter pieces of the song sound like they are waiting for somebody to finally lose their patience. Then the chorus gives that feeling a sense of somewhere to go.

What I like most is that the song does not begin from a place of having already figured everything out. John has explained it through the anxiety and anger of living in a world where everybody seems to be yelling at everybody else, especially online, and the larger question underneath that noise is whether your life actually matters when everything around you feels chaotic and overwhelming. That is much more interesting to me than another song where the person reaches the first verse already knowing they are going to win.

There is frustration in Scream that has not been cleaned up yet. The world is loud. People are angry. Everybody has access to everybody else all the time, which somehow has not made us particularly good at listening. Social media can put thousands of voices in front of you before you have even gotten out of bed, all of them absolutely certain that whatever they are furious about is the thing you should be furious about too. Eventually there has to be a point where all that noise stops feeling like connection and starts feeling like pressure.

That is where Scream lives for me. Not in some neat argument about whether the world is worse than it used to be, but in the much more personal feeling of trying to hear yourself inside it. There is anger in wanting to break something beautiful, but there is also desperation underneath that impulse. If you are screaming because you want somebody to hear you, the scream itself is not really the point. Being heard is.

And suddenly that puts a song released in 2026 into conversation with a lot more of Skillet’s history than I expected. Monster was afraid of the thing inside you. Comatose kept reaching for connection through numbness and isolation. Rise looked at a world full of reasons to give up and pushed back. Dominion became increasingly concerned with what controls you. Scream takes all that external and internal noise and asks something painfully basic underneath it: does any of this mean anything, and do I?

That does not make the song some radical departure from Skillet. I actually think the opposite is more interesting. It sounds like the band reaching backward into parts of itself that had become less prominent while still using everything it learned in the years since. The heavy guitars do not erase the electronics. The rougher edges do not require John to pretend he is twenty-five again. The chorus is still enormous because apparently asking Skillet not to write an enormous chorus would be like asking me to write this post in 800 words. We both know that is not happening.

What changed is the balance. John has said the new music kept getting heavier until he finally decided they needed to go all in, and that choice is especially interesting given everything surrounding Revolution. Independence was supposed to let Skillet trust its own instincts more. If the instinct after that first independent album was to turn around and make the guitars heavier, let some uglier emotions stay ugly, and work with David Cowell from Sleep Theory alongside Korey, then I am very interested in where that instinct leads.

There is another full-circle piece buried in its making, too. For this new music, Skillet went back to Memphis and worked with someone who had known the band before the first album was even made. Nearly thirty years after John Cooper and Ken Steorts were pushed together there to see what might happen, Skillet went back to the city where this whole strange thing started while making music for whatever comes after Revolution. I could probably invent some giant poetic meaning for that if I wanted to. Mostly, I just think it is really damn cool.

And the timing gets even better because Scream arrived alongside a tour celebrating twenty years of Comatose. Skillet is literally placing the record that defined its modern sound alongside a song meant to show where the band is headed next. That could have turned into pure nostalgia very easily. Instead, the new song sounds like it wants to make enough noise that nobody mistakes the anniversary for a funeral. I love that.

Because if this entire post is about evolution, the least interesting ending would be Skillet spending its thirtieth year politely reminding everybody what it used to sound like. Scream does not reject that history. It uses it. I can hear pieces of the heavier band I loved on Collide, some of the tension that made Comatose hit as hard as it did, and the modern production Skillet spent the next twenty years learning how to control. None of those things are identical to what they were before, and they should not be. The point was never to become the old Skillet again.

It was to remember that the old Skillet still belongs to them. Scream also opened the door to something bigger than a standalone single. After The Storm is a six-song EP arriving on October 9, and Lift Me Up is the second track from it that we have actually heard. Before either song existed, I probably would have read that title in the easiest possible way. The storm happens, you survive it, the clouds move on, and the story becomes about whatever peaceful thing waits on the other side. That is not what these first two songs sound like at all.

If Scream is what it feels like when all the noise finally becomes too much, Lift Me Up feels like what happens when the noise dies down enough for you to realize you are still carrying everything underneath it. The guitars are heavy again, but what grabs me more is the position John writes himself into. He is not standing above the problem telling somebody else how to survive it. He is underneath the weight, asking to be pulled out.

That distinction matters to me, especially this late in Skillet’s story. John has described writing the song while many things were dragging him down, and he asked God to lift him up. He has also said it reminds him of early Skillet while still feeling fresh, and I can hear what he means without pretending it sounds like somebody secretly found an unreleased track from 1998. The connection is not that Skillet has recreated an old record. It is that some of the vulnerability that could get buried beneath the certainty of the later anthems is once again much closer to the surface.

There is still an enormous chorus because, again, we are talking about Skillet. The band did not rediscover heaviness and suddenly forget twenty years of learning how to fill an arena. What I like is that the size of the song serves the underlying need rather than replacing it. Lift Me Up can hit hard without pretending the person singing it has already won.

That puts it in a long line of Skillet songs that become more interesting once strength and weakness are no longer treated as opposites. The Last Night needed somebody to stay. Comatose needed to feel alive again. Save Me admitted that whatever was happening could not be handled alone. Refuge needed somewhere safe to land. Now Lift Me Up is asking for help from underneath the thing doing the crushing. Thirty years into this band, the fight is still there, but so is the admission that sometimes fighting is not enough by itself.

That is where the title After The Storm starts making considerably more sense to me. After does not necessarily mean over. You can survive something and still have to live with what it changed. You can get through betrayal and still have trouble trusting somebody. Grief can stop being the first thing you think about every morning without actually leaving. Fear can become quieter without disappearing. Sometimes making it through the storm just means you finally have enough room to see what the storm left behind.

We know that is not an accidental reading being imposed on a title, either. Skillet has described this EP as coming out of betrayal, grief, perseverance, and ultimately hope, with John writing from one of the more vulnerable places of his career. That last part is what interests me most after spending this entire post following the band from the uncertainty of the early records into the confidence of modern Skillet. Confidence is useful. Vulnerability gives it something to push against.

The production makes that return to weight feel intentional too. Korey produced the EP with David Cowell from Sleep Theory, and Skillet has been very clear that they decided to get heavier and hit harder this time. Two songs are not enough for me to declare that we have entered some permanent new era, but they are enough to make me believe the direction is real. Scream has abrasion. Lift Me Up has weight. Neither one sounds embarrassed by the fact that Skillet used to be a considerably rougher band.

The rest is where I have to stop pretending I know the future, which is actually one of my favorite things about writing this section right now. The remaining songs are Grave Stomper, After The Storm, Heaven Help Us, and Come and Find Me. Those titles give me plenty of ideas about where the EP could go, especially with everything John has already said about what was happening emotionally while he wrote it. They are still only titles, though. I have not heard those songs, and I am not going to review music that does not yet exist for me.

I kind of love having to leave that space empty. Most of this post benefits from hindsight. I know what Collide led to because Comatose already exists. I know what Lori leaving and Jen arriving changed because I have almost twenty years of music on the other side of it. I know what happened when Monster escaped because we have watched that song become larger than the era that created it. Even Revolution, as recent as it is, has already given us enough distance to see independence becoming more than a press-release talking point.

After The Storm does not give me that luxury. We are standing in the middle of this one. Scream is here. Lift Me Up is here. Four songs are still waiting. We know Skillet deliberately went heavier; we know the material came from a darker and more vulnerable place for John, and we know he has described the larger purpose in the same language that has followed this band almost from the beginning: making music that can help somebody get through the dark long enough to face another day. What we do not know is what any of this becomes once the whole EP exists.

Maybe Scream and Lift Me Up will end up being the clearest picture of where Skillet goes next. Maybe one of those four unheard songs changes the conversation completely. Maybe this is a short, heavy detour before the band moves somewhere else again. Thirty years of Skillet should probably make me smart enough not to predict which version will win before I have actually heard it.

What I can say is that I am considerably more curious about the next four songs now than I would have been if Skillet had simply followed Revolution with another perfectly competent version of something it had already done. These first two songs feel restless. They sound like people who know exactly what their band is but have remembered that knowing yourself does not require staying comfortable.

There is also no escaping how ridiculously well the title fits my own history with them. One of the earliest Skillet shows I can still picture clearly happened during an actual storm at Summerfest in 2007. Nineteen years later, I am sitting here writing through thirty years of their history while the newest chapter is literally called After The Storm. I am not giving the universe credit for planning that one. It is still a hell of a way for these two ends of the story to meet. And I think that is exactly where I want to leave this part of the story: not after the storm as if everything is finished, but standing in whatever comes after it and waiting to see what survived.