Mastodon Give Update On Their New Album

At the end of last year, Mastodon’s Troy Sanders told Kerrang! that the band are “constantly creating” and had been “sifting through ideas” as of November 2019, and now Bill Kelliher has given a more concrete update on the Atlanta heavy metal titans' progress.

Speaking on a new episode of RocknRoll Beer Guy, the guitarist reveals that Mastodon had “20 rough songs” before the coronavirus pandemic, and they're looking to get back together immediately to see if they can finish up any of these ideas and see where they're at.

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Describing the sound of this new music, Bill explains (via ThePRP): “The new record, the stuff I’ve written is not quite as notey as that [2017's Emperor Of Sand]. It’s definitely got a more like Neurosis heaviness. Like simplified guitar parts and Brann [Dailor, drums/vocals] has been doing a lot of… He also demos most of the vocal ideas because he always has melodies and stuff like that and he’s been singing on a lot of it – at least for the demo purposes.

“The vocals are kind of like an Asleep In The Deep style, kind of Radiohead-ish almost, real melodic. Just a lot of vocal harmonies. When I think back about it, even though we’ve got like 20-25 songs, we still don’t have all of Brent's songs in there yet. And there’s still a lot of time for that stuff to change and to morph into other stuff.

“There’s a couple of old riffs – ’cause I’m constantly writing… I may write a hundred riffs a week but only one of them is any good… I wrote some stuff years ago that I sent to Troy and he took it upon himself to throw down some vocals on it and spun it back to me the other day and I was very surprised. It was a pleasant surprise. I was like, 'Wow man, this sounds really eerie. Like really dark and eerie and cool.' Like I never expected [him] to do anything with it…

“So Troy's trying to be more involved. Everybody has their place, their part in the band. I don’t know, every record is just a little bit different on how it gets written or who writes the majority or whose songs make it on the record or what not.”

Excitingly, he also says that Mastodon have written a new song for the upcoming Bill & Ted film, Bill & Ted Face The Music.

“We got asked, like a couple months ago, to be a part of the new Bill & Ted movie, to put a song in there,” Bill announces. “So we wrote a song to be in that movie which we’re kinda of wrapping up now. It’s pretty fun.”

Listen to the full podcast below:

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