Second Skin

Second Skin is the debut of a band that began as an idea in the head of Frontiers president Serafino Perugino. The brief was plain: put the voice of Nathan James of Inglorious at the centre of a Whitesnake-shaped sound. Perugino worked the line-up out in consultation with his in-house producer Alessandro Del Vecchio — two guitarists in Michael Sweet of Stryper and Joel Hoekstra of Whitesnake, Marco Mendoza on bass, Tommy Aldridge on drums. It appeared on 17 June 2022. The method is the interesting part. Sweet asked Hoekstra to send him riffs with no arrangement attached — the same way he had worked with George Lynch on the Sweet & Lynch records — and then built the songs by fitting those riffs against his own. James and Hoekstra already knew each other from Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and Sweet had fallen for James's voice after hearing Inglorious. Recording was spread across the players' separate studios. “Nowhere to Run” led as the single. Sweet does not sing here; he sticks to guitar and harmonies.