Skillet release After the Storm, and John Cooper explains the weight

On October 9, 2026, Skillet released the independent EP After the Storm on their own label, Hear It Loud. The six songs are Scream, Lift Me Up, Grave Stomper, After the Storm, Heaven Help Us, and Come and Find Me. David Cowell, known for his work with Sleep Theory, produced it with guitarist, keyboardist, and John Cooper’s wife, Korey Cooper. The day before the release, on October 8, SPIN published a conversation with John Cooper. The band has been playing Scream live since June. By mid-August the track was past five million streams. Lift Me Up and its anime-style lyric video arrived on August 14, the day the EP was announced.

“‘After The Storm’ is special to me because it reignites what SKILLET was always meant to be — which is music that helps lift people out of dark times. I wrote these songs because I needed to be lifted out of my own darkness.”

John Cooper

He said that in August, when the EP was only an announcement. In the October interview he goes song by song. On Scream, he says he wanted energy, the kind of track you would put on at the gym, which is how he listened to rock when he started playing sports and driving. The lyric runs, “Inside the silence / Behind the screen / The light is dying.”

“It’s alluding to this internet angst culture where people are yelling at each other all the time. People are spending all this time on phones, not in real relationships, but in these false relationships. We’ve just gotten used to yelling at each other, and I really hate it.”

John Cooper

Since February he has posted almost nothing on Facebook or Instagram. His podcast went on an unannounced hiatus at the same time. He does not call the song a lyric directly about social media. For him it points at the volatility of the moment, and at the feeling of “I thought I would be more than this.”

In August he described Lift Me Up as a reminder of early Skillet that still feels fresh. When he wrote it, too many things were dragging him down, and he was asking God to lift him up. In the interview Cooper adds that the song is about his own demons and his own depression, patterns that knock him down and that he cannot climb out of alone. The lift can be faith, a wife, or someone close. In the chorus he sings, “Lift me up / Not gonna die tonight / Gonna rise above it.”

Grave Stomper sounds like a title from a Rob Zombie shirt. Cooper says it is about something else. The church community he had been part of for 25 years turned bad. He never imagined it. Some of his extended family was part of what broke. “It was becoming a very toxic, ugly thing that we just had to leave.” He says there is really no way to talk about it.

An hour before the interview, at a festival in Indiana where Skillet were billed with Daughtry, a man who looked about 60 came up to him backstage. Cooper retells it: the man got teary and said the band’s music had helped him get sober. He had been an alcoholic for 35 years and was eight months sober. Cooper stops there. “I’m sorry, I’m getting emotional. That’s the heartbeat of Skillet.”

Cooper’s mother died in 1990, when he was 15, after a three-year battle with cancer. She taught piano and sang in church. Rock and drums were forbidden at home. After her death his relationship with his father unraveled, and he went toward the music he had been kept from. “I would say it was the biggest life altering thing that has happened to me. It’s why we sing so many songs about fighting your demons and telling people that they matter.”

The band now is John Cooper, Korey Cooper, lead guitarist Seth Morrison, and drummer Jen Ledger. That lineup has been together for 16 years. Korey joined around the 2000 album Invincible. Cooper compares Ledger to Dave Grohl: her job is to beat the life out of the drums. Revolution came out in 2024, their first album after leaving Atlantic, where they had been for 20 years. This year they are on a tour for the 20th anniversary of Comatose (2006). Monster, from Awake (2009), is six-times platinum, past five billion streams, and in Spotify’s Billions Club. For the last two years Cooper has repeated the same line: stay in his lane, play rock, and sing about hope.