Shinedown‘s latest project has been three years in the making.
On Friday, the band will premiere ATTENTION ATTENTION, a film inspired by their 2018 album of the same name. As frontman Brent Smith tells ABC Audio, the movie was always the final goal for ATTENTION ATTENTION.
“Once we had the record written, we knew that it was a conceptual piece,” Smith explains. “The goal was always to show it all in its entirety as a visual piece and an accompaniment to the audio and the songs.
The end result is an hour-long optical roller-coaster ride that runs the length of the album, with each song getting its own video separated by Smith’s interstitial voiceover narration. Some of the videos, such as those for singles “GET UP” and “DEVIL,” have already been released, but are presented in a new context within the film as a whole.
Certain characters and visual motifs pop up throughout ATTENTION ATTENTION, though Smith doesn’t feel it comes to a singular, clear-cut conclusion.
“For us, it was about allowing the viewer to have their own interpretation,” Smith says.
ATTENTION ATTENTION was directed by Bill Yukich, whose editing work on Beyoncé‘s Lemonade earned him an Emmy nomination. One of the enduring images from that groundbreaking project was the shot of the “Formation” star wielding a bat while wearing a yellow dress, which is coincidentally paralleled in the use of yellow throughout ATTENTION ATTENTION.
While that parallel was unintentional, Smith sees it as another example of the universe doing what it does in bringing Yukich to Shinedown’s, well, attention.
“We gravitated towards each other because the universe said, ‘Yeah, these four guys and this dude, they need to meet,'” Smith says. “‘They’re gonna create something’ that, in my opinion, is pretty awesome.”
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