After paying tribute to his "dead drunk friends" with last year's Hollywood Vampires album, Alice Cooper is renewing some living acquaintances for his next LP.

Specifically, as Cooper recently told The Weekender, he's reunited the surviving members of the original Alice Cooper Band for an upcoming effort inspired by the sound of his 1971 release, Killer.

"We’ve always been a hard rock band, guitar rock, and I’ll never give that up. But every once in a while, though, there’s just a flavor of what album do we want to go to here to give it that flavor," explained Cooper. "And it seems to be going toward the Killer album. And I kind of go, that album, let’s revisit the sound of that album and what we were kind of thinking. You can never go back and totally recapture it, but you can certainly look at the elements that made that album work the way it did."

Cooper, who performed with his surviving former bandmates last fall, said he's already written a handful of songs for the project, including some with drummer Neal Smith and guitarist Mike Bruce. "We worked together in Phoenix for about two weeks just writing songs and demoing songs. And you never know which ones are going to make the album, but I said let’s do that," said Cooper, adding that bassist Dennis Dunaway would also be contributing material.

In Cooper's eyes, the project is a tribute to past glories rather than an attempt to relive them. "It’s fun to go back and work with guys you haven’t worked with in awhile," he explained. "It’s not trying to recapture your youth. It’s trying to recapture a sound. And it’s a very elusive sound."

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