Mastodon should be hitting the studio in October to begin recording their new album according to guitarist Bill Kelliher. Speaking with Guitarmania.eu in late August, he said of their progress with it:
“I’ve already come up with eleven songs, which is probably about an hour’s worth of music—like, finished, start to end. It’ll change as everybody chimes in and takes the things I wrote and maybe changes them a little bit, or we might take parts out or write a new part. Honestly, I was very busy the past few months, like writing. ‘Cause I have a studio at home, so I can just sit down there and listen to a click track and record all my ideas that I’ve come up with on the road… ‘Cause I don’t have the time to write when I’m at home—I’m very busy at home with my family and my kids. I can’t just sit there and go like this [plays air guitar] all day. That’s what these days [on tour] are for. It’s seventy percent there. It just needs everyone to play on it.”
“It’s a little bit of the same as the last album, but I think it goes even deeper in certain areas—a couple more psychedelic parts, a little more technical parts. There are a couple of new places we haven’t gone before. So it’s just kind of a continuation of the last record to me, but even deeper.”
He also spoke of recording & release plans:
“[It should be out] early next year hopefully. We’re going to try to record it in October, when we get home… Get a month to bounce it off each other and make it a record. ‘Cause like I said, it’s like seventy percent there, it just needs everybody to play on it.”
He also commented on Spotify and the current state of the music industry in general:
“It’s very hard to make it in this business, you know what I mean? Especially in America, every fucking kid is in a band—any dude fifteen-years-old and up is like playing guitar or playing drums in a band, it’s like everybody is. Some are good, some are bad. It’s not a very lucrative business anymore because people just don’t buy your records, unfortunately.
Because they can get it for free or go listen to it on Spotify or whatever and then they make your money… I mean everybody takes pictures on their phone now, they don’t need to call a photographer. Everybody wants to hear music but they don’t want to pay for it.”
“Pretty soon you’re going to out all the people that specialize, that are artists, out of business, because you don’t want to pay for their things. You don’t think about it, like ‘oh, I just won’t buy the record, I’ll just listen to it on Spotify or I’ll buy it on Spotify‘ yeah, but it’s different, you’re not paying the artist. The artist does not get paid through Spotify very much, if anything.”
Previous comments made by guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds hinted that effort may wind up a double album thanks to a surplus of material leftover from the sessions for their previous release, “Once More ‘Round The Sun“. Those songs were originally intended to be released as an EP that never happened.
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