Mastodon are currently in the throes of working on their eighth studio album and there are already talks that the band could be recording another if the pandemic continues.
In a recent appearance on the Full Metal Jackie radio show, drummer Brann Dailor confided that the band has more than 30 songs written for their upcoming album and are in the process of recording and whittling them down.
“It is a good problem to have,” said Dailor (as transcribed by Loudwire) when asked about the surplus. “It’s also a little bit stressful because I feel we have had too much time off. Like a lot of groups, we have had too much time and we’re constantly working. We had the shut down for a couple of months, but we’re back at it.”
He continued:
“I guess it’s a good thing we’re still wanting to come down here and wanting to work on our 20-year-old project that we have been calling Mastodon. It’s exciting to me because every time you go to approach writing new stuff, you say, “Well, when is this well going to dry up? When are we going to go looking and can’t find it anymore?”
“That is always a fear that a lot of musicians and artists go through.”
“Sometimes you do have a mild case of writer’s block or maybe you have a severe case of writer’s block. That isn’t the case with us, luckily. We have an abundance of material and a lot of really great things. The hardest part is going to be picking the ones that go on the actual album because there are too many songs at this point. We want to put maybe 10-12 songs on the album and we have like 30.”
Even with the abundance of songs for the album, Dailor says the band is still coming up with new ideas. He told Full Metal Jackie, “We were jamming the other day and we had like 30 songs we could be running through and we started writing something brand new. It’s like, “STOP!” …but don’t stop as well.”
Dailor rules out making the new release into a double album, but says that some of the songs that don’t make the cut could end up on an album of their own.
“As much as I think it’s kind of not the best to have one in the chamber, I don’t necessarily think it’s great for us to release a double album. I don’t see the problem recording a full length album and then because of the fact that we are not going to be able to go on tour immediately, record another full length album not far after.”
“I think that that’s a possibility that we will have an abundance of music and we will have an abundance of stuff that we really dig that we can release to the public while we are still in this muck.”
The first new album will most likely see a release sometime in 2021.
In the meantime, Mastodon released an album of rarities titled Medium Rarities, back in September. Among the covers, instrumentals and live recordings, the album included a new song, “Fallen Torches,’ which was released as a single in July. A video for the song was released on September 11, the same day as the album. In August, the band released a new song they had written for the Bill & Ted Face The Music soundtrack called “Rufus Lives.”
