(Credits: Far Out / Aerosmith)
Fri 17 October 2025 4:00, UK
Normally when a band enters their fifth decade together, they can be forgiven for phoning things in a little bit and not pushing boundaries as much as they might have formerly done. In the case of Aerosmith, this was far from being the approach that they took.
Granted, they hadn’t been doing much together for a while when they got in the studio to record their fifteenth album, with their previous effort, Honkin’ on Bobo, having been released eight years prior. Not only that, but this release was also largely a covers record, making it over a decade since they’d released their last album of entirely original material. If that’s not phoning it in, then what is?
Hardcore fans might not have minded this, but Honkin’ on Bobo generally received lukewarm reviews, and so the general public might have wanted something a little more balls-to-the-wall to reassure them that the real Aerosmith hadn’t given up the ghost. Having released a number of bravado-filled rock records in their earlier years, then pivoting towards balladry and later returning to their blues influences, it was about time that the band delivered what they were best at, and that may have required them to put in the extra effort.
Music from Another Dimension! was the record they ended up making and releasing in 2012, and it’s somewhat all over the place, with the band literally throwing all of their past sounds at the record to see what sticks. This might sound like a mess, and one could argue that it is, but you can’t fault them for putting the effort in to ensure that they were pleasing all of their fanbase by making a record that covered literally everything they’d proven themselves to be good at in the past.
In an interview with Guitar World shortly after its release, the band wanted to make this abundantly clear to those who thought the band might have lost their bite, and both Steven Tyler and Joe Perry hammered home the message that the album lives up to its name. “We really wanted to give it the feel that you were in the room with the band,” Perry exclaimed, noting how they’d designed it for listening with headphones.. “That’s how you get your best sound and have an intimate kind of experience.”
Tyler went even further to assert that the music on the record had arrived from a far-off realm. “It truly is music from another dimension,” he claimed. “It’s from us and it’s from our alter-egos and psyches and our greatness and our fucked-up-ness. It’s just really a piece of who we all are. If you want to hear rock and roll at its finest, just listen to Joe’s song ‘Oh Yeah’ on the new album. Then go listen to ‘Out Go the Lights.’ I haven’t heard anybody do anything like that in a while.”
It might be an overblown mess of ideas and a record too bloated for its own good, but it’s clear that they had fun making it and felt proud of the way they’d returned to the old ways. By that point in a band’s career, that’s pretty much all you can ask for, and even though they’ve not released anything since, you can imagine that they’d be happy to bow out knowing they gave their all on the final record.
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