Atlanta, GA progressive metal outfit Mastodon have plans in mind for their ninth studio album. Should those plans come to fruition, the group’s follow-up to 2021’s “Hushed And Grim” will come together in 2024. Speaking recently with Guitar Summit, the band’s guitarist Bill Kelliher shared an outine of waht the group have in the works:
“…I’m constantly writing. We just got off a tour with Gojira just a couple of weeks, about a month ago, and we’re about to do a cruise back home. We’ve never done a cruise — like a rock and roll cruise — with Lamb Of God and GWAR and Shadows Fall. That’s gonna be really fun. And then at the end of the year, in November, we’re gonna do a South American tour with Gojira.
And hopefully when that’s over, December and in the beginning of next year, we can start sitting down and actually riffing out and writing a new record. Because it’s already time to — it’s past time to write a new record, even though ‘Hushed And Grim‘ was a double album, and I feel like there’s a lot more juice for the squeeze of that record, but we just haven’t — because of COVID, we didn’t tour enough on it. We haven’t done a proper European tour. There’s a lot of places we’ve missed and it’s, it’s hard these days to get out and tour because everything has changed.”
He continued:
“Without going into too much detail, the price of everything, the price of gas goes up. And that trickles down to us as a band. When we go out on tour, we have to come up with half a million dollars just to support the tour, like of our own money that’s supposedly saved, which I don’t have that much money — we don’t have any money saved.
Every time we do a tour, we spend all the money — we give, ‘Hey, here’s your paycheck.’ ‘Cause we were home for two years from COVID, and try not working for two years. It’s difficult. Luckily, my wife works; she’s got a very good job. So it’s been very difficult. Our manager passed away a few years ago, and that kind of put us in this crazy tailspin, ’cause he was our everything. And COVID happens, and the way the world is going right now, it’s not the easiest thing to get out there and just start touring and trying to make money.”
Returning to the topic of a new record, he added:
“The answer to your question is yeah, next year we are gonna write a new record, and I’ve already started writing and I’m very excited about it. It’s a nice time. It’s just — I guess what I’m getting at is, like, it’s already time to write a new record and take time off when my wife’s, like, ‘You need to get out there and work. You guys haven’t worked in the past three years. You’ve only done a month a year.’ It’s not a lot of time out there.
But I’m, like, yeah, well, the world is upside down and the gas prices are crazy. And everybody’s on tour trying to make back their money from the lost wages. And it’s a mess. But I’m not gonna let it stop me from writing the next right-turn record.”
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