EI8HT is the eighth studio album by Jacksonville, Florida hard rock band Shinedown — frontman Brent Smith, guitarist Zach Myers, bassist and producer Eric Bass, and drummer Barry Kerch — released May 29, 2026 on Atlantic Records. Recorded across 2024 and 2025 at Big Animal Studio in Charleston, South Carolina and produced, engineered, and mixed entirely by Bass, the eighteen-track, sixty-four-minute double album follows 2022's Planet Zero and represents the band's most ambitious and sonically wide-ranging work to date. Preceded by six singles released over the course of more than a year — "Three Six Five," "Dance, Kid, Dance," "Killing Fields," "Searchlight," "Safe and Sound," and "Outlaw" — the album was announced alongside the Dance Kid Dance Act II World Tour, a global run co-headlined by Coheed and Cambria on select dates, covering North America and Europe through late November 2026. As Smith told Kerrang!, "without question as a band we pushed ourselves like never before," calling Bass "an extraordinary producer, engineer, mixer, songwriter, musician, performer and bandmate."Across its eighteen tracks, EI8HT moves with deliberate breadth through hard rock, pop rock, alternative rock, and country rock — Apple Music described it as "a sprawling double album" and singled out the range of tonal contrasts, noting that "'Safe and Sound' is a pounding rocker with metallic overtones while 'Searchlight' is a country ballad — complete with steel guitar, banjo, and fiddle — that Shinedown debuted live at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry in 2025." The album opens with the explosive "At the Bottom," moves through anthemic hard rock on "Machine Gun" and "Killing Fields," and closes with "The Pilot," co-written with Dave Bassett and described as one of the record's most emotionally resonant moments. "So Glad That You Asked" marks the first time Bass has taken lead vocals on a Shinedown album. The Setlist called the album "the most ambitious and diverse release yet" from a band more than two decades into their career, describing it as "a culmination of more than 25 years of Shinedown's evolution" centered on the band's signature thematic concerns of loss, resilience, love, and mental health.
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