Songfacts®:

• This was released as the third single from 1000hp on May 10, 2015. The song's release was accompanied by a military campaign. Speaking with Mike Hsu of the Massachusetts radio station WAAF, frontman Sully Erna explained: "As everybody knows who's in bands and releasing singles, as you get deeper into the album cycle, it's a little trickier to keep the love on the album, to keep people interested, to keep the momentum going. And 'What's Next?', actually, was neck and neck to be the first single that we released. It was between that and [the title track] '1000hp', because we felt really strongly about both. But, of course, we went with '1000hp', 'cause it was more about the history of the band and we wanted to bring it back to Boston and the roots. So that being said, we knew 'Something Different' would always be our second single, and 'What's Next?' now was the obvious choice to release as the final single on the record."
  
  "When I started thinking about the whole concept of bringing it back to the roots, part of our history was doing a lot of campaigns with the US military - back on the 'Awake' record, when they were using that as the recruit commercial for six years straight," Erna continued. "And I started thinking, the words to this, the lyrics are about, like, 'Nothing in life is certain except for life and death, but what's next?' And I started thinking this may be the song to kind of raise awareness for not only homeless vets, but post-traumatic syndrome that these guys suffer from when they come home from war and it affects their families and things like that. And it just so happens that the Red Sox teamed up with an organization called Home Base, and that's exactly what they're doing; they're bringing all these doctors around to do these seminars and they're training other doctors to give them the proper medical attention on how to cure this properly rather than having these guys feel like there's no place to go and being embarrassed about it, or whatever it is… feeling exposed. It's a really, really great charity that they got involved with."
  
  "So we decided to take this song," he concluded, "and kind of use it as a platform to team up with anything that we can do to help out with the women and men of the US armed forces."