With Earth Rocker under their collective belt in 2013 and vocalist Neil Fallon all good post-back surgery, Clutch has once more become a writing machine. The band did a new song "Run John Barleycorn, Run" for Record Store Day this year and there were plenty of rumblings of the group doing pre-production work all through 2014, but nothing substantial ever really surfaced.
Now in an interview with Lithium Magazine, Fallon reveals the group will be touring basically for the rest of 2014 and then hitting up the studio right as 2015 gets going in January.
"We've got this September run that's kind of anchored with these Riot Fests and a festival at the end of it in Baltimore. And then we'll take October, November and December off to finish up writing and pre-production [for our new studio album]. And then we'll do a run from Christmas to New Year's to mid-January out to Texas, where we plan to record it. And then we'll record in January and February and probably the beginning of March, take a little bit of time off, and [get] back out on the road."
Let's just take a moment to appreciate the fact that the band has been putting out material since their 1991 EP Pitchfork and have been nothing but consistent ever since then. Fallon actually brings up exactly that too in the interview, saying they try not to be the same band at all times, but they are who they are at the end of the day.
"We find ourselves, we'll play a riff and we'll say, 'We've heard that before' and discard it … And that can be a good thing, and it pushes you to find something new. But at the same time, it's important to accept one's strengths. An example of that is a song on 'Earth Rocker', 'D.C. Sound Attack!', that opening riff. We played it and we said to ourselves, 'We've done this before. It sounds too much like Clutch.' And [producer] Machine said, 'Well, you are Clutch, so really, what's the issue?'"
Some bands can rock the same sound for a long time and still sound fresh, Clutch being one of those bands. Why ruin a good thing?
[via Blabbermouth]
