Alice in Chains singer and guitarist William DuVall said the band had faced “benevolent” ghosts as they worked on its new album Rainier Fog, which is out today.

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The follow-up to 2013’s The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is their third to feature DuVall, matching the number of LPs they made with original singer Layne Staley before his death in 2002. The new album also marked a homecoming for the band, which recorded in Seattle for the first time since 1995.

“I think there was some residue from the past lingering, but the ghosts were benevolent, they were there to help, not hinder,” DuVall told Kerrang in a new interview. “I wrote the lyrics to the song ‘Never Fade’ right there in Studio X. I thought, ‘I’m not leaving this room until I chase this song down.’ I sang about the history, all the songs that had been written, all the arguments among bands and discussions about the future. I was thinking about my grandmother, who’d just died a few months earlier; thinking about Layne Staley, thinking about Chris Cornell, who’d just passed a month before – just letting it wash over, and at the end, I walked out into the dawn and felt I’d had a significant spiritual experience. It couldn’t have happened anywhere else.”