“If we’d made it bigger, one of us would’ve been dead.” Clint Lowery on 30 Years of Sevendust, ONE, Recovery & Animosity

Underrated. It is a strange label for a band that have sold millions of records, built one of the most loyal followings in American heavy music and, almost 30 years after their debut, are still making records with the same five musicians who established the classic lineup.

That longevity will take Sevendust back across the Atlantic later this year, when the band embark on their first European headline tour in eight years in support of ONE. The run begins in Hamburg on November 25 before heading through Germany, the Netherlands and France, followed by an extensive UK and Ireland leg that concludes at London’s Electric Ballroom on December 15. It follows their return to European stages earlier this year as guests of Alter Bridge, when Thinking About Guitar caught up with Clint Lowery at the O2 Arena.

Lowery has heard that “underrated” tag enough times to know exactly what people mean. “The longevity — that’s our legacy,” the guitarist says. “The original members, the fact that we haven’t hit these huge peaks, but we haven’t hit the lows either.” Some bands arrive, explode and disappear; Sevendust have simply kept going, riding what Lowery describes as a remarkably stable wave for the best part of three decades.

Of course, there have been times when they would have liked that wave to reach a little higher. Lowery freely admits the band would have loved to headline arenas and reach another level commercially, but these days he is far more philosophical about where they ended up. “We like being the underdogs, though, man,” he says. “We don’t mind it. That’s what we are. We’re a mid-level, very grateful band, and we still care about it.”

Then comes a rather more sobering thought. “I think if we’d made it bigger, one of us would’ve been dead,” he says. “You know, with the abuse of alcohol and the things we’ve done when you’re young and growing up in this business, if we’d gotten that success, maybe it would’ve altered our career in a bad way.”

It is quite a statement from a musician sitting backstage at London’s largest indoor Arena, where Sevendust were finally back in the UK after a long absence. There have been tours on the books that were cancelled for various reasons over the years, but Lowery has never forgotten the reaction he has received from British audiences when visiting with other projects. “The loyalty and the passion of the fans here is incredible,” he says. “It’s such a tragedy that we haven’t been here more. But, you know, that’s hopefully going to change.”

They also returned with a new record. ONE is studio album number 15 for Sevendust, but the title has much more to do with where the five members find themselves now than any kind of numerical milestone. “We were really connected as a band, personally,” Lowery explains. “Our relationships were really tight-knit.” For him, there is also a spiritual element following what he describes as a journey of faith with Christ and God, while the other members can attach their own meanings to the word. “Ultimately, it’s the unity of us.”

That idea runs naturally into “We Won,” one of the album’s most direct statements about making it through difficult times. Lowery had been sitting on the music for a while before it was selected for Sevendust, but the song eventually became intertwined with some of the adversity he has faced personally over the past couple of years. “I’ve been through a lot of adversity personally,” he says. “Multiple challenges.”

The sentiment behind it is fairly simple. “Anyone that goes through anything, if you get through the other side, you win. You know, it’s a battle.”

Fifteen albums in, Lowery has plenty of studio days against which to compare the experience. But when asked how day one making ONE compared with walking into the studio for Sevendust’s self-titled debut, he finds more similarities than might be expected. Back then, nobody really knew how any of it was supposed to work. “We were just raw,” he remembers. “We wanted just to do a record and get underway. We’ve always felt like impostors. So we were excited, you know, and hungry and ready to do whatever.”

They had been in studios before, but never to make a full record for a label, and that uncertainty brought its own pressure. “We were all in,” Lowery says. Nearly three decades later, that feeling returned. “This was as close to that as we’ve been.”

One important part of the equation has remained unchanged throughout those years: Lajon Witherspoon. Lowery still sounds genuinely impressed by what the Sevendust frontman can do, particularly the durability of a voice that remains so central to the band’s identity. “I marvel at how durable his voice is,” he says. “A lot of singers tend to overthink their vocals, and he just goes and does his thing, man.”

For all the focus that naturally falls on Lowery’s guitar work, he is equally clear about where his priorities lie when he is writing. “Guitar — we can do solos and we can do different things, but I write music for his voice,” he says. Then, while trying to describe just how valuable Witherspoon is to Sevendust, he corrects himself. “He’s not an asset. He is the asset. He’s the focal point.”

After almost 30 years, the obvious question is how long the band can realistically keep doing this. Morgan Rose has spoken previously about not knowing how many more long tours he has in him, while Lowery himself joined the Alter Bridge run partway through. Rather than offer some grand declaration about a farewell, though, Lowery talks about five musicians who are simply at different stages of their lives.

“Everyone in the band has their own threshold,” he says. “I’m in a season where my kids are young. They’re in high school, very involved in sports.” Other members have children who are already out of the house and may naturally want to tour more. “We’re coming into that part of our career where there may be a time where I’m like, ‘I can’t do the whole thing.’ So we respect each other enough to allow that to happen.”

For now, he has stopped trying to look too far ahead. “I take everything a tour at a time. I don’t try to predict when the end will be.” Touring is harder than it used to be — “You’re an old man, you know” — but he still loves playing, and as long as the quality remains there and Sevendust do not become “a shell” of what they once were, the appetite has not disappeared.

There is a practical side to it, too. “We need to survive. It pays our bills. It’s our livelihood. And we love the people, man. I mean, that’s a hard thing to give up.”

For Lowery, surviving Sevendust has at times meant surviving himself. He makes no attempt to soften the years when alcohol and drugs became a serious problem. “I definitely had a time where I was the squeaky wheel,” he says. “I had a lot of problems with alcohol and drugs.”

During his period away from Sevendust, Lowery toured with Korn, and it was there that things eventually reached their lowest point. “I had hit my bottom with them, and that was the end of the drinking for me,” he says. Sobriety ultimately allowed him to rebuild his career, return to Sevendust and find a very different relationship with the band he had left behind. “I was absolutely — I was the Keith Richards of Sevendust,” he jokes, before quickly clarifying the comparison.

More significantly, leaving gave him a perspective he perhaps could not have found while still in the middle of it. “Leaving the band was one of the best things because I got sober and I came back with a new gratitude for the band.”

Talk then turns towards the guitars. Lowery tracked ONE through his Kemper using a PRS Archon profile, giving producer Elvis Baskette a sound he knew intimately and could simply play through without worrying too much about what might happen later in the chain. “It’s just a tone that I’m really comfortable with,” he says.

What Baskette does with it afterwards can be rather different. “There are Diezels involved, and he’s a huge amp purist. So he reamps everything.” Some of the Kemper sound will occasionally survive into the final mix, but Lowery admits the finished record can still take him by surprise. “I’ll get the records back in the mix. I’m like, ‘My tone was not that.’” The overdubs are looser still. “He’s a pedal fanatic,” Lowery says. “It’s chaos. He just pulls different ones, and we just sit around and have fun with the overdub process.”

Lowery’s association with PRS is well documented, although he is hardly blind to everything else hanging on the wall. “I love old Teles, Strats, Gibsons. I’m a fan of all of them,” he says. “I just love PRS.” One of his longest-serving instruments is a late-’90s Custom 22 nicknamed Bruce Lee, acquired around the beginning of Sevendust’s career. “It was just a great guitar and it had a lot of soul to it.” More recently, PRS built him an instrument connected to his Lumbee heritage and made in honour of his father. “That is probably the best guitar that I’ve played that they’ve ever made,” he says. “And that’s recent.”

His own guitar education came with considerably fewer options. Lowery grew up alongside Troy McLawhorn, now of Evanescence, and the pair learned their favourite records the old-fashioned way: tape deck, rewind, listen, try again. “We’d play by ear,” he recalls. Yngwie Malmsteen raised the bar, while Steve Vai’s Flex-Able — and specifically “The Attitude Song” — became one of Lowery’s personal challenges. “I’m going to learn this from top to bottom,” he remembers thinking.

That meant hours of woodshedding, often eight hours a day. Lowery and McLawhorn also tackled the harmony section in Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” while Eddie Van Halen presented another catalogue of guitar parts that had to be decoded without a camera angle, slowed-down lesson or online tab to point them in the right direction. “We didn’t have tutorials or video to see them play it,” Lowery says. “You’d just go listen.”

Sometimes their interpretation turned out to be correct. Sometimes they would finally see somebody play the part live and realise they had been doing it completely differently. Either way, the process taught them something valuable. “We trained our ears,” he says. “We couldn’t slow it down. We couldn’t do anything. We were just trying to figure it out, and it just really made you focus on what you were hearing.”

A few years later, those ears were helping Lowery put his own stamp on songs that would become Sevendust staples. “Black” is one of them. When Lowery joined the band, most of the song already existed. “They had already written that basic song without the intro,” he says.

He was sold on it almost immediately, not least because of Witherspoon’s performance. “Lajon’s vocal was just undeniable to me. That was one of the reasons I wanted to join the band.” The intro came later, almost by accident. The song had previously started from a click, Lowery had a tremolo pedal in the room and simply began experimenting. “I just kind of did it in the room and they were like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’”

If “Black” belongs to the period when Sevendust were still figuring out exactly what they could become, Animosity was where Lowery believes they finally worked it out. Twenty-five years on, the album remains a benchmark for the band and, in Lowery’s mind, the first time all the different parts of their identity arrived in the same place.

“I think that was the first record we did that truly encompassed what we were trying to do: melody, groove, heaviness,” he says. Morgan Rose’s vocals were becoming a larger part of the sound, producer Ben Grosse played a major role in bringing everything together, and the finished record finally matched the band Lowery thought Sevendust should be.

“That was the first time we left the studio like, ‘That’s what we sound like. That’s what we want.’”

To this day, it remains probably his favourite Sevendust record in that respect. Whenever somebody compares a newer album to Animosity, Lowery takes it as a positive, although he has no interest in trying to make the same record twice. “There’s a certain ingredient that’s in that record,” he says.

Nor is Lowery interested in trying to out-heavy a younger generation of metal bands. “There are so many bands doing incredibly heavy with just ridiculous riffs,” he says. “We’re like, ‘Let’s just stay in our lane and do what we do.’ We’re never going to out-heavy these heavy bands.”

The conversation eventually circles back to Metallica and Master of Puppets, but this time not as a guitar lesson. Instead, it becomes an example of the problem facing any band with a classic record in its past: you cannot simply decide to recreate the circumstances that made it special.

“They’re not the same human beings. Production’s different,” Lowery says. “If they put out Master of Puppets today, it would not be received the same.” He pauses and laughs at his own certainty. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe it would. It’s pretty awesome.”

But the wider point stands. “It’s a product of the time,” he says. “That’s the magic. It was only for that time, and it resonated at that time.”

Lowery is still looking for other places to take his writing, too. Asked whether his acoustic project Hello Demons… Meet Skeletons could ever return, he admits that although he previously put it to bed, he has begun to miss what it gave him creatively. “It did a particular thing for me creatively because it’s so much different than Sevendust, and it’s more intimate, more vulnerable.”

The original project was closely tied to his recovery, and another chapter could potentially take in his faith and some of the struggles he has faced more recently. “I wouldn’t mind opening that back up,” he says. “It was my recovery record.”

Sevendust’s ONE Tour hits Europe and the UK throughout November and December 2026, beginning in Hamburg on November 25 and concluding at London’s Electric Ballroom on December 15. For full dates and ticket information, head to the band’s official website.