Tom Morello: Rage Against the Machine Not Working on New Music
Despite various rumors of a new album, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello said the band has no plans beyond releasing the upcoming 20th anniversary reissue of their first album, Billboard reports.
While frontman Zack de la Rocha and bassist Tim Commerford had both hinted on separate occasions that a follow up to Rage’s last record, 2000’s Renegades, might be in the works, Morello said that the band is focused now on the November 27th release of Rage Against The Machine – XX, a two-CD/two-DVD set.
“We’re really psyched to be putting this out for the fans,” Morello said. “We are blessed with having perhaps the most passionate fans to ever listen to a bootlegged recording or mosh at a show, so I want to really give them a motherlode of Rage Against the Machine history, past and present.”
The upcoming reissue is filled with b-sides and unreleased cuts such as “Darkness of Greed” and “Clear the Lane”; while the DVDs feature homemade footage of early Rage concerts, including the band’s first public performance on October 23rd, 1991, in Northridge, California. The liner notes were also written by Public Enemy’s Chuck D.
“It doesn’t feel like 20 years, but at the same time it’s sobering that it is,” added Morello. “There’s no crystal ball that we could’ve looked into when we were writing these songs in 1991 that would have told us we’d be talking about this record over two decades later. And I will say that 20 years later we’re able to take pride in the fact that in the history of rock music there has never been a more popular band with as radical politics as Rage Against The Machine, nor has there been a band with more radical politics than Rage Against The Machine that has been as popular. That is the lasting testament to the first shot fired by this album and how it continues to resonate with rebels around the world.”
While a new Rage record may not be in the works, Morello told Rolling Stone recently he’s got an album-and-a-half’s worth of material for his next solo effort under his Nightwatchman moniker. Citing I-80 and the Civil War as influences on the new record, Morello also pointed out that Rage fans will be happy to know that his new material “lends itself to huge riff-rocking, which is sort of a new thing in the Nightwatchman world.”