Mastodon Eyeing Early 2017 For New “Dark Pop” Album
Things are happening in Camp Mastodon; after taking most of 2017 off to write, it seems the band is starting to think about getting into the studio and putting together a record for release in the first half of 2017.
Metal Injection has unearthed a recent interview with Bill Kelliher, conducted by Morgan Richards Interviews, in which the guitarist shares a glimpse into what the band’s been working on:
In the past six months, I’ve built a studio in my basement, where I can sit down there and really write and concentrate, so I feel like out of the eleven or twelve songs that we’ve got demoed with vocals and a lot of lyrics, but not… The lyrics are always the last thing to shape up together. I think we’re pretty close. I think it’s not gonna take very long to get in the studio and knock it out. Hopefully [it will be] an early 2017 release.
Reading between the lines here, the album release still sounds like it’s a ways off — studio time hasn’t even been booked yet, let alone production schedules established — but a release in the first half of 2017 could certainly be a possibility given all that.
What’s the new music sounding like?
What I can tell you is it definitely sounds like Mastodon, and there are peaks and valleys of one extreme to the other. But, you know, to me, a lot of the things that I wrote sound like ‘Once More ‘Round The Sun’, but even delving deeper into all those nooks and crannies or progression and a lot of catchy choruses and just melodic verses and stuff like that, but not so much like ‘The Motherload’; that’s pretty poppy for us, probably as poppy as we’d ever be sounding. [It’s] not quite in that direction, but trying to get into more of a darker… It’s hard to say ‘dark’ and ‘pop’ at the same time, but, to me, it’s an easy way to… When something pops and it really speaks to you and it’s catchy, like something you wanna hear again. ‘Cause I like to go back to things when I’m writing — something that kind of comes full circle. Not on every song, but a lot of the songs that I’ve written for this record are like that — they need to come back to the chorus to bring back that same good feeling you got in the beginning. That’s just me; I like to tie everything up nice and neatly most of the time.
“Dark pop” is a fair summation of what recent Mastodon has sounded like, but this is just one member talking in a band where all four members write: drummer Brann Dailor recently said he wanted the next record to be more proggy. So, in summation: new Mastodon will probably sound exactly like Mastodon. Looking forward to it either way.
