Skillet Leaves Atlantic After Two Decades: ‘It’s Time for Us to Be Pushed Out of the Nest’

After nearly 20 years on Atlantic, Skillet has left the label and is ramping up its Hear it Loud imprint to independently release its new single — “Unpopular,” arriving Friday (Aug. 9) — and new album, Revolution, coming Nov. 1.

“After this long, we’ve learned enough about our audience to know what they want to hear,” Skillet frontman John Cooper tells Billboard of the Christian and mainstream hard rock band. “We have a pretty good handle on that now, so it’s time for us to be pushed out of the nest, or maybe jump out of the nest.”

Cooper admits making the leap wasn’t totally comfortable for him. “There’s a part of me that didn’t like it because I don’t like new things. I don’t try new food. I don’t like going to new destinations. My wife makes fun of me,” Cooper says with a smile as he sits in the living room of his spacious new hilltop home south of Nashville, where he and his wife/bandmate Korey relocated from their home base in Wisconsin.

“I had some really good relationships, so that was the hard part is that I liked the people that I worked with a lot and learned a lot from them,” Cooper says of leaving Atlantic. “But it just felt like a new season. It just feels like it’s time for a change.” 

That confidence is well-earned. Since launching in 1996, the Grammy-nominated and multiple Dove Award-winning band, which also includes Jen Ledger and Seth Morrison, has placed three albums in the Top 5 of the Billboard 200, two No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Albums chart and a pair of chart toppers on the Top Hard Rock Albums chart. They have one of the most streamed rock songs of the 21st century with the five times RIAA platinum-certified “Monster,” while their 2016 hit, “Feel Invincible,” made Skillet the first Christian act to top Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Songs chart since the chart’s launch in 1981. They also scored 11 No. 1s on the Christian Rock Songs chart before that chart ended in 2018. The veteran rockers tour relentlessly in the U.S. and abroad and their songs have been licensed by the NFL, Marvel, ESPN and WWE. 

The Coopers and Skillet’s manager Zach Kelm formed the Hear It Loud imprint a decade ago. Artists LEDGER, Colton Dixon and Fight the Fury all released albums on the imprint through Atlantic Records (Dixon and LEDGER remain on Atlantic through Hear It Loud). Now, as the imprint morphs into a full-service label handling all aspects of Skillet’s marketing and promotion, Kelm has hired independent radio promotion, social media and marketing teams to work the new music. Vydia will distribute Hear It Loud.

Cooper says the band didn’t consider signing with another label. “If we were going to do that, I would have just stayed [at Atlantic] because we had 20 years of very successful history with good people,” he says. “They knew the band and liked us.”

Cooper says one of the factors that made Skillet, whose last album was 2022’s Dominion, opt for independence was the desire to move more quickly in terms of recording and releasing music. “One of the things about being independent is being able to make quick decisions,” he says. “There’s not this chain of people that need weigh in on it. The system takes a really long time. Instead, I wrote a song and we recorded it eight days later. That is a huge benefit. With the change in pace of technology and of the industry, that was important to me to be able to make quick decisions.”

Securing a larger piece of the pie was also a factor in going the indie route, especially when it comes to streaming. “We were looking at the amount of international streams that the band gets from touring, doing festivals and shows all over the world,” Kelm says, “and just by picking up the international piece, it was going to be worth it from a financial standpoint to go on our own.”

“The international stuff is really a big piece,” Cooper agrees. “I don’t know how Skillet became an international band, but it happened. It was like we woke up one day and went, ‘Oh my gosh we’re streaming like crazy overseas.’ We’re trying to catch up and that is a major upside of what we’re doing now.”

As to whether they plan to sign additional acts to Hear it Loud, Cooper says they haven’t decided yet. “Let’s see what happens,” he says, “but if it goes good, there’s sort of a natural progression that seems obvious and I like that.”

Cooper’s immediate priority is launching “Unpopular” to pave the way for Revolution. “I think that people hear a song like ‘Unpopular’ and they feel the same way,” Cooper says of the single, which encourages the listener to stand up for what they believe even if it isn’t popular. “That’s one of the things I hope people get from the record is courage. I think when people know that they aren’t alone then they go, ‘Oh okay, then I can stand up.’” Fans can pre-order the song here.

The 10-song album, produced by Brian Howes, Seth Moseley, Korey Cooper and YOUTHYEAR/Carlo Colasacco is a mix of the incendiary rockers Skillet is known for alongside poignant moments such as “Happy Wedding Day (Alex’s Song),” which Cooper penned for his daughter. “As I started writing it, I was like there’s no way I could sing it at the wedding. But the day of the wedding I woke up and felt like, ‘I can do it,’” Cooper says. “Korey never even heard it. Alex had never heard the song. My manager was at the wedding, and the next day I said, ‘You aren’t going to hurt my feelings at all, but I think we should record the song. What do you think?’ He was like, ‘Oh definitely!’”

Cooper says the title track reflects the spirit of the album. “‘Revolution’ really is the overarching theme of what we want to say. We really need a revolution of love,” he says. “That song sounds a little different for us too. It’s a little alternative. The cool thing about doing an independent project is going, ‘All right, let’s try something new! Why not? And don’t be afraid.’”

The band, which is also launching a new app, addresses these fractured political times on “All That Matters,” which Cooper describes as a patriotic song. “Thirteen or 14 years ago it was a very different time, and part of the message of the song is saying if we could go back to that time, it really wouldn’t matter if you’re on the right or the left, because people got along,” he says. “There were things that we agreed on, like faith, family, freedom. There were things that mattered in life, and we were going to stand up for those things, wave the flag and be patriotic. We live in a country where you are free to chart your own course. Free to worship the God you want to or to not worship God and to raise your family. That was just kind of a live-and-let-live kind of thing. It was really wonderful, and that began to change.”

Cooper says being independent had a big impact on the way the new album was written and recorded. “It was a really incredibly liberating feeling,” he says. “We only wrote songs that we loved, and we only recorded songs that we loved, and we did it all super-fast. If this wasn’t independent, I feel it would be another year before we’d be releasing new music. If you look at Skillet’s timeline, you’ll see that it was every three or four years. It was a long time between albums.”

The band will perform music from the new album on their fall U.S. tour with Seether. Then in November, they’ll embark on their first tour of the Middle East, then will conclude with dates in the U.K. “It’s just really weird that 27 years into our career, we are opening up new markets around the world,” he says. “We’re spending half of the year overseas now, and I never would have dreamt that in a million years.”

Nearly three decades into their career, Cooper is happy with Skillet’s journey. “I always tell people, ‘We’re the biggest band you’ve never heard of.’ I laugh about it,” he says. “In no way do I live in frustration about it, because I’m just so blessed. The truth is I can’t believe I’m still playing music. I’m so lucky. How can I ask for more?

Cooper believes the band’s underdog status has helped their longevity, noting that, according to their Instagram data, Skillet’s No. 1 audience is the 25-34-year old demographic. “That just plays into the strangeness of the Skillet story,” he says. “That’s why, in some ways, this move to go independent is not the most shocking thing in the world, because we’ve always done things out[side] of the box. So why not try to crank it up and be the underdog again? That’s the Skillet story.”