The last thing we heard about Mastodon was that they were planning to release a new EP at some point this year, but things started to progress in a different direction and the band decided to make a new full-length album out of the material they had. Considering the release has been in the works for the past two years, we can safely assume the album is deep into its writing stage and now, the band is shooting to have it out early next year. During a recent interview with Morgan Richards Interviews, guitarist Bill Kelliher revealed their plans to that coincide perfectly with that, stating:
“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.”
In addition to that, Kelliher elaborated on the direction this new record will take:
“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.”
Looks like our prediction of a “slow, moody” album wasn’t that far off but we’re still going to get a Mastodon album with their progressive sound they’ve always had and loved. You can check the rest of the interview below.
[via Metal Injection]
