Papa Roach Rock Band

Because "it's fun to tour with your friends," according to Seether bassist Dale Stewart, his band and Papa Roach will start 2015 with a co-headlining tour that begins Jan. 9 at Hard Rock Live in Orlando, Fla., and wraps up Feb. 7 at the Hard Rock Hotel Casino's The Joint in Las Vegas.

"The opportunity came up to do this and we said, 'Hell yeah, let's do it. Let's have fun. Let's make some noise,' " Stewart tells Billboard. "I think our bands go really well together. I think we complement each other. I think it should be a good show."

Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix, who's on the line at the same time, adds, "It's a big night of rock 'n' roll, I mean straight-up. Papa Roach and Seether, we've been on the scene for years together, side by side. We've done a lot of shows together. I think for rock fans coming out, between our two bands it'll be like taking a ride on at least 10, 15 years of what we both bring to rock 'n' roll".

The tour catches each band in a different phase of their respective album cycles. Seether has been touring -- including a late summer run on the Rockstar Energy Uproar Festival -- since before the July release of its seventh album, Isolate and Medicate, which debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, with a video just out for its new single, "Same Damn Life." Stewart says the group hopes to feature more of the album's material in its sets for this tour. "We've only really played maybe three or four of the new (songs) live," Stewart notes. "Initially the responses are a bit slow, but I think the longer the album's out, people have time to live with it and get used to it and they tend to be familiar with it and enjoy it more." However, he acknowledges, "Once you've been doing this long enough, coming up with a setlist becomes more of a challenge. You'd like to play a lot of new stuff, but there's a lot of old stuff people have paid money to come and see as well."

Papa Roach, meanwhile, will actually be hitting the road two and a half weeks before the Jan. 27 release of its new album, F.E.A.R. (Face Everything and Rise), whose title track comes out Tuesday as the album's first single. The follow-up to 2012's The Connection was a two-year working progress on which Shaddix says "we definitely stretch out pretty wide and go deep." He says the group is anxious to air the songs live even before its release. "That's the whole point of this, to get out there and bare it all, live on stage," he says. "We're excited to rehearse the new material so we can perform it live; it'll be cool to see people's reactions to the songs they haven't heard yet live, first, and I think that's going to be a fun moment for us." Papa Roach has been playing Face Everything and Rise during its recent European dates, and Shaddix reports that "the reaction has been really good, so I'm just really excited about that."

Will the two bands do anything together on stage? "We haven't talked about it with you guys at all yet," Shaddix tells Stewart during the conversation, "but me and the guys thought it would be cool if maybe we come out with something," to which Stewart replied, "Yeah, I'm down." In other words, stay tuned.

Kyng will be opening all of the tour dates. The Los Angeles trio's Pepe Clarke said that, "We are very happy to be a part of the Papa Roach and Seether tour. It gives us the opportunity to play with the guys in Seether again, and we also get to make new friends with the Papa Roach camp. This is also a chance to play in front of a bunch of new faces that may have never heard of Kyng otherwise."