Mastodon's new album is shaping up to have quite a few intriguing rumors around it. We've been told that the new stuff might be a little big more progressive, and we've been told that the album might be a double album, with one side called Cold, Dark Place. Whatever the case may be, guitarist Bill Kelliher tells Morgan Richards Interviews (below) that the album will hopefully be out by early 2017!
"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."
Kelliher also elaborates a little bit on what the new stuff will sound like, though his explanation pretty much amounts to "it'll sound like Mastodon, but new."
"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."
So who the hell knows what this new album will be, though that doesn't make me any less stoked for it.
