The Skillet After the Storm EP arrives freighted with more than the usual promotional weight. According to Skillet Wiki – Fandom, the six-track release is scheduled for 9 October 2026, and in conversation, John Cooper makes it clear this is a record shaped as much by private rupture as by studio ambition: a church community dissolved, depression wrestled with in plain sight, and a deliberate retreat from the culture wars he once waded into freely.
From a Memphis Bedroom to the Skillet After the Storm EP
The backstory matters here. Cooper was 15 when his mother died after a three-year battle with cancer. She was a piano teacher who sang in church and quietly encouraged her son’s musical instincts inside a household where rock music, anything with drums, was forbidden. Even wearing black drew censure. Her death in 1990 severed something in the family: Cooper’s relationship with his father unravelled, and the music he had been warned away from became the thing that kept him upright. ‘I would say it was the biggest life altering thing that has happened to me,’ he says. ‘It’s why we sing so many songs about fighting your demons and telling people that they matter.’
That origin feeds directly into the new material. The EP’s first single, ‘Scream’, has been performed live since June, a raging piece built around the anxiety of digital isolation. Cooper’s lyrics, ‘Inside the silence / Behind the screen / The light is dying’, nod at what he describes as ‘this internet angst culture where people are yelling at each other all the time’. He has drawn his own conclusions from that diagnosis: since February he has posted almost nothing on Facebook or Instagram, and his podcast went on unannounced hiatus at the same point. The song isn’t a manifesto, he insists, but an emotional portrait. ‘It’s that feeling of, “I thought I would be more than this.”‘
A second track, ‘Lift Me Up’, is franker still about interior struggle. Cooper describes it as a reflection of ‘struggling with my own demons… some of my own depression and fighting off some of these patterns that pop up in your life’. The lyric, ‘Lift me up / Not gonna die tonight / Gonna rise above it’, is deliberately non-specific in its address: God, a spouse, a friend, any force capable of pulling someone out of an abyss. ‘I found in those times, I’m just like, man, I cannot do this on my own,’ he says.
Then there is ‘Grave Stomper’. Cooper acknowledges the title would sit comfortably on a Rob Zombie T-shirt, but the song’s subject is specific and painful: the collapse of a church community he had belonged to for 25 years, one that ‘turned bad’ and from which he eventually had to walk away. Extended family was implicated. ‘There’s really no way to talk about these things,’ he says, and leaves it there.
Three Decades On: The Weight of ‘Monster’ and What Comes Next
Skillet emerged from Memphis in the mid-1990s, their 1996 debut arriving as grunge was giving way to nu-metal. The band was labelled Christian rock from the outset, though Cooper notes the music could have sat plausibly beside Nirvana and Bush on any mainstream playlist of the period. Getting signed to a major label was hard-won: years of rejections from people ‘freaked out’ by the spiritual dimension preceded the 2003 deal with Lava Records, an Atlantic imprint. Cooper’s retort to the sceptics then was that Johnny Cash and Elvis had done the same thing, singing their own truth without apology.
The 2006 album Comatose locked in the melodic heavy sound that now defines the band, and it is the subject of a 20th anniversary tour this year. It fed into the commercial breakthrough of 2009’s Awake, which produced ‘Monster’ and ‘Hero’. ‘Monster’ now sits inside Spotify‘s Billions Club, making it one of the most-streamed tracks in all of Christian music. Their last album, Revolution, appeared in 2024, their first since leaving Atlantic Records after two decades.
The current lineup has held together for 16 years. Seth Morrison handles lead guitar; Jen Ledger, the U.K.-born percussionist, has also emerged as a key vocalist, her voice paired with Cooper’s on ‘Hero’. Cooper compares her drumming energy to Dave Grohl’s. His wife Korey joined on keyboards and backing vocals around the time of their 2000 album Invincible, and the band has functioned, as Cooper tells it, as an extended family: their children grew up on tour, and Ledger was at his daughter’s wedding.
The political commentary of his book Wimpy, Weak and Woke, released in late 2020, brought death threats alongside its supporters. Cooper has set that aside. ‘My motto the last two years: I want to stick in my lane. I want to play music.’ At an Indiana festival date earlier that same day, a fan in his sixties told him, tearfully, that Skillet’s music had helped him reach eight months of sobriety after 35 years of alcoholism. Cooper paused when recounting it: ‘That’s the heartbeat of Skillet.’ The Skillet After the Storm EP, due 9 October 2026, is where that heartbeat currently lives.
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