Meshuggah drummer Tomas Haake and fiance Jessica Pimentel (best known for her work on Orange Is The New Black as Maria Ruiz) are working on a new musical project together.
In an interview with the Behind the Vinyl podcast released on June 16, Pimentel (who aside from acting fronts metal band Alekhine’s Gun) mentioned that she and Haake started working on something together while in quarantine.
“That’s a very funny thing,” she said when asked if she and Haake ever work together. “We have been wanting to jam for a long time. It’s, like, you know the ‘meeting your heroes’ situation? We are both, like, ‘God, I love the way you play. It sounds really great.’ ‘Oh, I love the way… You wanna jam?’ ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ ‘Eh, tomorrow.’ [Laughs].”
She continues,
“It’s kind of just been the two of us for the last two months here, so we both really need to play, and so we’re gonna do some of that. We also have the honor and luxury of having some nice, new Korg keyboards here, so maybe what we jam out might not be metal at all. He’s actually picking up the wires for that right now — all the cables that we need — and we’ll see what comes out. We already have our anonymous band name to release stuff on Bandcamp. We’re not gonna tell you what it is, you’re not gonna know what it is, but it will be out there.”
There is no word yet on when we could be hearing something from the couple.
Pimentel has been busy with Alekhine’s Gun as well lately. The band released their first new single in six years, “21,” on June 16. Said Pimentel of the song,
“Inspired by the traditional Tibetan Buddhist prayer ‘Praises to the Twenty-One Taras’, ’21’ is a musical offering and an act of paying homage to the primordial power within by delving deeply into calling upon the forces of fierce compassion and the wrathful aspect of love and wisdom needed in times of fear and uncertainty in order to seek refuge and gain enlightenment. Reaching beyond time and space, the bond between us and the true nature of reality is unbreakable, unstoppable and eternal.”
“21” will get an album release on Alekhine’s Gun’s upcoming EP, Year of the Lazarus. Upon release, it will be the follow-up to 2014’s …And Kings Will Fall EP.
Meshuggah is also working on new music. In November 2019, it was announced that the band had gone into “writing mode” following a string of tour dates that ended in May that year. The band recently had to cancel two co-headlining shows with Devin Townsend, that were set to take place this week.
