Mastodon's new album could be anything – a double album, a reworked version of its "lost" EP with some new tracks, or just a regular ol' Mastodon album. Whatever the case is, Mastodon is currently in the studio with producer Brendan O'Brien (Rage Against The Machine, Korn) doing it up! Well, according to the Instagram of Brett Hinds, anyway. O'brien produced the 2009 Mastodon album Crack The Skye.
The band just started with the album's recording process, so I'd wager that we won't see it until early 2017.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BLHRbOkAfG0/?taken-by=bhinds
In previous interviews, guitarist Bill Kelliher did his best to describe the sound of the new music:
"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."
Meanwhile, drummer Brann Dailor recently described the new music to Metal Hammer as sounding more "proggy"
“It sounds like Mastodon to me but an updated version. We always try to push to hear something new and hear something different, so that’s what’s going on. It’s impossible to tell somebody what something sounds like so I’ll spare the details but so far so good – we go with what we know, play what we like and if we don’t like it, we don’t play it.”
“I’d like to get a little more proggy, and have a little more space and play around with dynamics a little bit more – just dive a little deeper with some of the riffs and some of the parts. Just get more explorative and push in that direction and say where normally there’s a stopping point, try to push beyond it. We’ll see what that yields.”
