Shinedown Amaryllis

In March 2011, guitarist Zach Myers has stated that the band was writing material for a fourth studio album. Myers stated that the band had around 14 songs written, and planned to work further on the album later in the year.

While attending the 59th annual BMI Pop Awards on May 17, Brent Smith was asked if the new album was similar to that on 2008?s platinum-certified album The Sound of Madness. Smith responded back, “Not really, because we can’t compare any of the other records to this one — just like we can’t compare the first one to the second one or the third one to the first one,” he said. “We pride ourselves on being a band that each record sounds completely different than the last. The beautiful thing is the journey and finding out where you are in your life, not only as a person, but where you are as an artist and as a musician and how far you’ve come and how far you’ve grown. So, for us, we tour a lot — our last record, we toured for almost three years — so it’s very, very crucial and very, very important for us for this fourth record [to be as strong as possible], so we take our time.”

On August 16, 2011, it was announced that Shinedown had begun recording new material at Ocean Way Recording with producer Rob Cavallo, who had previously worked with the band on The Sound of Madness. On December 15, it was announced that Shinedown planned to release their first single of their new album, "Bully", on January 3, 2012.

On January 3, 2012, in conjunction with their new single "Bully" being released, the band announced that the new album will be entitled Amaryllis and will be released March 27, 2012, with pre-orders available on January 17. The following day, it was confirmed that the band has secured a deal with Roadrunner records to release the album in every territory besides the US where they are still signed to Atlantic.