Skillet, courtesy Jimmy Fontaine.

For Skillet frontman John Cooper, finally unleashing the band’s new record to the world was a bit like having a child.

“The baby’s finally here!” Cooper said enthusiastically, not long after Skillet released Dominion in January.

Cooper said the band got the album recorded faster than ever. Usually, they write consistently for two years and end up with 50 to 70 songs, before starting to cull them. This timer around, the entire record was done within four months, and Cooper and his bandmates wrote only 16 songs in all. The lyrics flowed from him much faster than with prior records.

“Sometimes you sit down and wonder what you want to say to the world, and you craft it and change it,” Cooper said. “Other times it’s almost more like stream of consciousness writing. I’ve written terrible songs and good songs both ways.”

At the outset, Cooper and his wife and bandmate, Korey Cooper, were set to fly out to meet with producer Kevin Churko to go over song ideas. The ebb and flow of the pandemic ended up preventing that meeting from happening before the recording got under way.

“Things were open, and then they were closed; planes were happening—then they weren’t,” he said.

Cooper and Churko were both apprehensive about having a creative meeting over Zoom but decided to go ahead with it. They never did get to spend time together in the same room, but the process went smoothly. Cooper actually credits the remote process with influencing some sounds on the record.

“I was probably more open to his ideas than I probably would have been if I’d been there,” he said. “They were able to try different sounds or chord progressions without me saying ‘no,’ frankly.”

On the flip side, recording from his home studio also allowed Cooper some room for his own creative exploration.

“I never would have tried it if they were around; I would have been too embarrassed,” Cooper said.

Cooper pointed to opening of the record, and the first single, “Surviving the Game,” which features the frontman delivering a dramatic spoken-word narration over the beat.

“It sort of sounds like something you’d hear at the beginning of a ‘Conan the Barbarian’ film,” he said. “It reminded me of something that Ivan from Five Finger Death Punch would do, or even, like, old Pink Floyd.”

While the pandemic created opportunities in the studio, it provided the roadmap for Cooper to express his reaction to what he was seeing evolve in the world. Musically, the result is one of the band’s heaviest and most urgent records to date.

“The really saddening part to me is how I have watched people that I love affected so deeply and fall into depression or substance abuse,” he said. “I was really moved by that, and it just came out on these songs.”

The record’s heaviness was born out of the mission to make the music with the message, and Cooper said achieving that heaviness included some screaming, which is not common in the band’s sound.

While much of Dominion is aggressive, Skillet also taps into new territory on the opposite end of the spectrum with some of the more intimate ballads in the band’s catalog. Cooper pointed to “Valley of Death” as a prime example. He said the song was the only one he wrote alone, and it was also the fastest to come together. When he played it for Korey for her opinion, he instantly knew it was bound for the record.

“We’ve always written ballads, but there’s just something about it that makes it feel more like classical music,” he said. “It’s classical-sounding in its arrangement, maybe more like some ’70s songs would be.”

Despite writing about serious subjects, Cooper said the goal was to keep the overarching message positive and uplifting, a rallying point of sorts for those going through difficult times.

“I want this to be a universal message that people hear and say, ‘OK, I can make it today. I can make it through this stinking pandemic, and jobs crisis, and fear, or my family member [who] got sick.’ We’ve all suffered in various ways, and I wanted to write a record that could empower people.”

While Cooper has been increasingly outspoken on the typically more conservative hot button issues of vaccine mandates and “cancel culture,” he said his goal is to make music that can inspire all.

“I’m an optimistic person, and I’m bullishly optimistic about 2022,” he said.

Follow writer Mike DeWald at Twitter.com/mike_dewald.