Alkaline Trio's Matt Skiba Plots Two Solo Albums

With Alkaline Trio's seventh album, 'This Addiction,' out this week, a national tour with Cursive underway and a new Epitaph Records imprint, Heart and Skull, to run, Matt Skiba has a lot on his plate. Still, the Chicago punk trio's main songwriter has other irons in the fire, such as the two solo albums he has in various states of completion.

The first, 'Demos,' was due out this month on Asian Man Records before the Trio decided to release 'This Addiction' on Feb. 23. "It's an album of stuff I did on GarageBand on my laptop, so it's very lo-fi and stripped-down," Skiba tells Spinner. "Mike Park, who runs Asian Man out of his parents' garage and likes being a small label, he's one of my best friends. I want 'Demos' to be kind of a small record. I want it to come out kind of quietly and be something that people will kind of have to seek out."

When 'Demos' does eventually hit shelves, people will get to hear some of what will eventually go on Skiba's solo album, one he says will be different than his 2002 split EP with Kevin Seconds or Heavens, his now-defunct side project with F-Minus bassist Josiah Steinbrick.

"I'm trying to do something that I haven't done before. I want people to be able to tell that it's me but I also want to do something that maybe may come as a surprise to some people," Skiba says. "Some of it's very minimal, some of it's kind of crazy. It's at the early stages of that. Danny [Lohner] from Nine Inch Nails and I work on it when we can. The way that we're doing it, we're sort adding things and taking things away and it could go in any direction. We're putting everything on them then stripping it back basically so some of it may be acoustic. Who knows?"

Still, Skiba is unsure which songs, if any, will overlap between the records. "Some of them, I'm hoping that they will," he says." "That was always sort of the idea. I was going to release 'demos' with Asian Man then down the road have some of those songs, if they make the cut, come out on the solo record eventually. The Trio is our priority and promoting this new record is what we're focusing on now, but we all kind of some projects in our back projects. When the solo record comes out we'll try to promote that and put it out through our own label."