Studio Album · No. 7
Planet Zero Songwriting Credits by Shinedown
Produced by Eric Bass · Engineered by Eric Bass, Doug McKean, Eric Wayne Rickert, Ted Jensen
Holds writing credit on 20 of 20 tracks
Authorship Breakdown 20 / 20 documented
Scored across the 20 tracks with documented writers, by whether Shinedown carries a lyricist or composer credit.
Share of the 20 tracks where a band member is credited, by role.
By the Numbers
Authorship on Planet Zero splits cleanly between two hands. Brent Smith is the lyricist across the full songs, while Eric Bass, whose legal name is William Frederic Bass Jr., produced, mixed, and co-wrote every track, and wrote all ten short interludes on his own. The composer column reflects that, showing Bass under his legal name wherever he shares a credit. Additional co-writers appear on the singles and heavier cuts, with Dave Bassett and guitarist Zach Myers recurring across 'Daylight,' 'Hope,' 'Clueless and Dramatic,' and 'Army of the Underappreciated,' and Blair Daly and Zac Maloy joining for 'Dead Don't Die.' The instrumental opener '2184' and the spoken Cyren interludes carry minimal credits, written and built by Bass alone.
Planet Zero is the seventh studio album by American rock band Shinedown, released by Atlantic Records on July 1, 2022. It is a concept album set on a dystopian world policed by an artificial intelligence named Cyren, whose spoken interludes thread between the full songs to narrate a society stripped of dissent. Frontman Brent Smith writes the album as a warning about political division, social media, cancel culture, censorship, and forced conformity, tracing what he described as the danger of losing a human lens. Bassist Eric Bass produced, mixed, engineered, and arranged the record at his Big Animal Studio in Charleston, South Carolina, his second full production for the band after Attention Attention. The twenty-track sequence alternates between ten short interludes built by Bass and ten full-band songs, including the singles 'Planet Zero,' 'Daylight,' and 'A Symptom of Being Human,' all of which topped the US Mainstream Rock chart. It debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 and topped the all-genre Top Album Sales chart, a first for the band.