Machine Head are currently hard at work in the studio on their eighth studio album and much anticipated followup to Unto The Locust. Frontman Robb Flynn has offered the following update via Facebook in his ongoing series of posts dubbed “The General Journals: Diary of a Frontman…And Other Ramblings:

As I step off the insane recording treadmill I’ve been on for a few weeks, one thing is for certain, it’s all about slow and steady progress. I mean, I really wish I had more of an exciting update to give you, but I’ve been slammed recording guitars, laying down vocals, and working on some killer packaging ideas with the Nuclear Blast crew.

Less than a week before we got into JingleTown we finished a pair of songs, one of which was literally not even an idea the week previous. Phil brought in some great, GREAT stuff at the 11th hour and we were able to turn it into a really cool song with the working title of: “Sharkbite Days Revisited.”

The other song, formerly-known-as “Blazing Saddles” just wasn’t working. Even though it had some cool parts it was just too god damned hard to play and make it sound natural, so we back-burnered it for a while. It was the type of song where we finally realized our mortality, LOL! One of those “dammit, I can’t play this fast at my age anymore” kind of moments! But it was a song that came at a time when we needed a good kick in the ass, and it completely helped break my writer’s block. It was the crack in the dam and after that, all hell flowed. So if anything it served its purpose well!

So on the 2nd to last day of rehearsals McClain and I deconstructed “Blazing Saddles”, and then reconstructed it into a far simpler structure, and its fuckin rockin’! Less of a Slayer/Slipknot vibe, and more of a “Screaming For Vengeance”-era Judas Priest feel to it. Appropriately, it has now been given the working title: “Simmering Saddles”.

I laid down some scratch vocal ideas on the 3 “newest” tunes, and made some huge progress on the song (working title: “Riffnado”). I can already tell it’s gonna be really cool.

So that’s about it for now. I know it doesn’t look like much, but as my engineer Juan says, “there some blood on the board there” (pic below).

Screaming For Vengeance-era Judas Priest? We’ll take it. The band has also posted the first in a series of vlogs focused on the production aspect of the new album which you can view in the video below. Apparently we’re going to be hearing more strings on this album, which is awesome.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/Hq74Yu-8fq0[/youtube]