John Petrucci has hinted that DREAM THEATER‘s next album will be musically inspired by the band’s current “Images, Words & Beyond” tour, which sees the pioneering group celebrating the 25th anniversary of its milestone RIAA-gold-certified album “Images And Words”.

The guitarist, who will take part in the 2018 installment of the “G3” tour alongside DEF LEPPARD guitarist Phil Collen and tour founder Joe Satriani, spoke about DREAM THEATER‘s future plans during an appearance on the “Trunk Nation” show on SiriusXM channel Volume.

Asked when DREAM THEATER will get around to working on the follow-up to 2016’s concept album “The Astonishing”, Petrucci said: “Those two ‘G3’ tours [in Europe and the United States] will take me to the spring of next year, believe it or not, so we won’t be able to get something going until some point next year and then we’ll have a release the following year. But we kind of already know the direction of what we wanna do. We’re really excited. Yeah, but it won’t be for a while yet.”

Pressed for some “hints” and “nuggets” about a possible musical direction for DREAM THEATER‘s next album, Petrucci said: “I think that reconnecting with the music from the era that we’re playing now and kind of where our headspace was in the early ’90s and everything, it’s kind of, I guess, for lack of a better word, reconnected us with the musical style of that period of DREAM THEATER. So it’s been really interesting talking about how we’re gonna approach the next record and everything. So, yeah, we’re psyched.”