Shinedown

Need to get fit but hate gym music? Then try the Shinedown frontman’s beefed-up selection to puff and sweat to instead.

“C’mon! Harder!” Brent Smith’s ultimate workout playlist.

Brent Smith can remember exactly when he realised that he needed to start working out. “It was 2011. I was still drinking pretty heavily and I was really overweight,” he recalls. “I got out of the shower and saw myself in the mirror. I went: ‘This isn’t gonna work. You look awful.’ It was a light-bulb moment.”

It’s stood him in good stead since. Shinedown’s taut new album, Attention Attention, is the work of a band still operating at peak fitness more than 15 years into their career. “I guarantee if you start working out, you’re gonna feel a lot better,” says Smith. “You can’t mess with Father Time, but you can come to an agreement with him.”

So start working out, and listening to these while doing so is guaranteed to make it a whole lot more fun.

Rage Against The Machine

Bulls On Parade

The reason for these songs is that they’re all the kind of songs that amp me up. And this one definitely does. I was fifteen or so right around the time that band came out. Nothing against Zack de la Rocha, cos his performance is amazing and this song is filled with fierce lyrics, but stylistically for me it was a lot to do with the rhythm section. Those tempos and how those guys lock into each other, they just had this insane groove. If you think about the beginning of this song, there’s no steady climb – it’s just ‘dnn dnnn dnn’. It doesn’t make you wait on it. Right out of the gate, it’s like, ‘It’s on!’

Gojira

Stranded

I didn’t know much about Gojira until about two years ago, when I heard this single from the album Magma. I hadn’t heard anything sound like that in quite a while. It was a very original tone, not only to his voice but also to most of the guitar work and everything. It’s just a beast of a song.

Black Sabbath

Fairies Wear Boots

It’s funny, we don’t really listen to a ton of music when we’re working out, but when we do make a playlist I will always put this in there. I find I can kind of meditate when this particular song comes on, even if I’m doing something physical. It’s good to get a little Zen before you begin the workout; get inside your own mind for a minute, be prepared and get ready to do what you have to do.

Soundgarden

Rusty Cage

I listened to the whole grunge thing when I was growing up. In the MTV era, they used to do these Buzz Clips, which they’d usually play at the end of the afternoon, before the Top 20 countdown. That’s where I came across Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. That was a big epiphany for me, cos I’d never heard that sound. That got me into Alice In Chains and Mudhoney and the Screaming Trees and of course Soundgarden. Rusty Cage sounds like it’s breaking out of jail. It’s got an attitude and fierceness that gets your blood moving.

Three Days Grace

The Mountain

We know these guys well – their first record came out a couple of years before ours and we toured with them in the States. They’re great guys. This is a brand new song. It’s got a really positive message, and it’s a great song for working out to. I don’t really take days off from training, I dedicate at least an hour a day, pretty much every day. Even if I’m taking a bit of a rest on my joints, I’ll still do yoga just for the stretching dynamic, to keep the blood moving through the muscles. I’m really not good at not doing anything.

Guns N’ Roses

My Michelle

It’s a dirty, sleazy, awesome song – everything you want from Guns N’ Roses. It’s not necessarily a song to cool down to per se, but it’s for a point in the workout where you want to go slow and steady.

I met Slash in 2006 when he was in Velvet

Revolver – we did some festival shows with them and we had a couple of nights backstage with him. He was super-cool. A really sweet human being.

Volbeat

A Warrior’s Call

This band is fantastic. I remember the very first time I heard Sad Man’s Tongue back in 2007 or 2008, and I thought: “Who the hell is this?” I was hooked ever since that. A Warrior’s Call is a freakin’ great song that you don’t have to ramp up, they come out of the gate and hit you.

Black Stone Cherry

Rain Wizard

A great song and a great band. In 2003 we played a golf course, of all places. We were the headliner and Black Stone Cherry were the first band on, at four p.m. They were kids, man. But when they went up there they just had a fury – they made a noise that was just amazing. We became friends that day and the rest is history. We helped them get with our management team, we’ve done quite a few tours together. We consider those guys family.

AC/DC

Back In Black

When I was about fourteen years old my mom outlawed music from the house because she felt it was messing with my schoolwork. So I had all these tapes hidden from my parents that I’d sneakily listen to on a Walkman in my closet after they’d gone to sleep. Back In Black is one of those albums. It came out of this huge tragedy, the death of Bon Scott, but it redefined rock’n’roll as a way of life. Brian Johnson has said he was visited by Bon while he was in the studio. He talks about how he went up to that mic in the booth, how he was just trying to focus on singing as hard as he could and as high as he could, with as much passion as he could. I think Bon was really helping him.

Marilyn Manson

The Beautiful People

I’d seen the video for their cover of Sweet Dreams and I didn’t really like it. I was, like: “This guy’s a little much for me.” And I was a big Eurhythmics fan, cos I love Annie Lennox. So I didn’t really appreciate it at the time. So The Beautiful People was a big surprise. It was dripping with fucking danger and attitude and defiance. If you’re working out, you need a good rhythm, and the rhythm on that track is amazing.

Attention Attention is out now via Atlantic. Shinedown play Download on June 10.