Mastodon are “Super-Close” to Recording Next Album
Mastodon are getting ready to release a rarities and B-sides collection, Medium Rarities, this Friday, September 11, with a new song called “Fallen Torches” arriving as a teaser a few weeks back. But the band have been looking towards their next album of entirely new material for quite a while already, having been working on it in fits and starts since late last year.
In a new chat with Kerrang!, bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders has revealed that the band have plenty of material written for their next album — way more than an album’s worth, in fact — and are currently in the process of fine-tuning and whittling it all down, after which they plan to record ASAP:
“When the touring slate got wiped clean back in March, my Mastodon bandmates and myself were thankfully all on the same page with the mindset that we wanted to be as productive as we possibly could without any actual touring going on,” says Troy today. “We all decided to dive in on new music. The thing is that we dove in and we haven’t stopped. One of the good things that’s come out of that is that we now have more material to sift through and work on than we’ve ever had before going into the studio to record. It feels like a real luxury to have more material than we need. We’ve been chipping away a little bit virtually every week all year. We’re super-close to being able to go in there to record…”
Asked about guitarist Bill Kelliher’s recent comments that the band has shifted their sound again, and what the new music sounds like, Troy answered:
“We’re not doing a double-album, but at the moment we have ideas for more than one album. It’s all being dissected and truly honed in on right now. There’s a lot of everything going on in that giant pool of potential songs – particularly in the deep end. We’ve got multitudes of sounds going on. Honestly, it is a little too early to tell.”
I like this “deep end” of which Troy speaks. I’m all about another style change for the band. I’d love to see it get REAL weird, ya know? Drop some Mahavishnu shit on us, guys!
Don’t get your hopes up for anything too soon, though: drummer Brann Dailor recently said the band prefers not to release their next album until the pandemic is over, and who knows what that will end up meaning from a practical band standpoint (i.e. touring). It’s also possible, of course, that the band just decides to fuck it and releases new music anyway, in which case mid-2021 is likely the earliest we’d hear anything.
