Def Leppard Talks Upcoming Album ‘Diamond Star Halos,’ Preview New Song “Kick”

In advance of their 36-city stadium tour with Mötley Crüe and guests Poison and Joan Jett, Def Leppard is releasing their 12th album Diamond Star Halos on May 27.

Videos by American Songwriter

The band’s first album since Def Leppard in 2015, Diamond Star Halos, a nod to the 1971 T. Rex hit “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” is a collection of 15 songs roused by the glam-rocked era of Bowie and Mott the Hoople, T.Rex, and Roxy Music that has continually resurfaced in the band’s music throughout their 40-year career.

“We actually use that to reference an era when we got introduced, sucked in by David Bowie, Marc Bolan and T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, and all of these bands and artists,” guitarist Phil Collen tells American Songwriter of the album title. “We kind of celebrated it in a way and there was no real agenda. We didn’t really know we were doing an album. We were just writing songs so it naturally went along, and before we knew it we were paying tribute and homage to our heroes.”

Throughout, Leppard melds the past and present, featuring Bowie pianist Mike Garson on tracks “Angels (Can’t Help You Now)” and “Goodbye For Good This Time,” and offers up more classic Leppard on “Fire It Up,” which was co-written with Sam Hollander, “Take What You Want,” and the thrusting “Kick.” They even dip into country and Americana with “Lifeless” and the nostalgic ballad “This Guitar,” both featuring Alison Krauss.

Initially set to write and recorded at singer Joe Elliot’s home studio in Ireland on March 22, 2020, when travel shut down around the pandemic, the band decided to compose everything remotely with Savage in England, and guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, and drummer Rick Allen in the U.S., a first for the band in their four decades together.

“We were writing for ourselves,” says Elliot. “Phil was writing with other people in California just for fun, and I was writing on the piano just for fun, and when the lockdown kicked in, we were planning on a month in the studio because we were still on tour as far as we were concerned, in June of that year, so we just kept working, and we figured out how to do it remotely.”

Elliot says the band has dabbled in working remotely in the past but the urgency of the new structure this time turned into a brand-new format for the band. “It turns out that we preferred it much more than the traditional way of working,” shares Elliot. “So it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever go back to the traditional way of working again.”

No boundaries and blueprints, which the band have typically followed in the past, while writing and recording, this time around everyone wrote as songs came to them. “Because of that, I think the album is way more diverse, it’s way deeper,” says Collen. “There’s, there’s more on it than a lot of our previous records, in terms of depth, in terms of instrumentation, in the way we experimented with different sounds, and how we actually projected the songs themselves.”

He adds, “That was mainly because we had the opportunity to do that. When you record it on your own, there are no time constraints. You weren’t holding anybody else up that wanted to get into the studio chair to record their bits. You just did it on your own, in your own time, and sometimes you allowed yourself the freedom to go down some like blind alleys.”

Devoid of any social or political elements, Diamond Star Halos is Leppard’s ode to music with no agenda, no statement.

“We’ve always tried to make music that cheers people up,” said Joe Elliot in an earlier statement. “We want to pull you out of politics, what’s going on in the world, and anything you’re dealing with. That was a really important statement for ‘Diamond Star Halos.’ We didn’t write about everything going on right now. We just wanted to make a classic album. End of story.”