Devin Townsend is currently working on a new album called The Puzzle, which he's trying to release in early 2021. Townsend recently told Guitar Interactive that the album is "abstract, stream-of-conscious, super-complicated, complex, ambient nonsense" and will include both a movie and a graphic novel. Townsend also revealed that he's trying to get the rather abstract movie onto Netflix.
"I took these abstract pieces of art that Travis Smith had done, and I put a filter on them in Premiere that basically fills in all the negative space with colors and shapes," he said. "And we do massive zooms on parts of it, and that becomes a landscape, and then we make it three-dimensional. And we take these pieces of art and turn them into environments, and then we animate them with stick people, and those stick people are meant to represent really basic, mundane human activities amidst these imposing, terrifying landscapes. And then the music becomes the soundtrack to that."
Townsend also elaborated on why The Puzzle is going to be so complicated and weird, adding that it's basically a reflection of how things have been through the past year.
"The Puzzle is abstract, stream-of-conscious, super-complicated, complex, ambient nonsense. And it has a movie and a graphic novel. If it was anything other than abstract, chaotic nonsense, I think I would have been full of shit. If I came out of this being, like, 'Hey, man, here's a bunch of songs. This is about everybody needs to get together,' and all this sort of stuff, I'd be, like, 'Well, you're not paying attention then.' Because how I feel is abstract and chaotic and fighting for emotional equilibrium. And so that's what I wrote. And as a result of that, it's exactly what I should have written… It's a narrative about what I perceived as the human condition, but through my own filter… And there's an animator and a graphic artist and this crazy four-dimensional type of artwork that I've been working on. And it's beautiful and so strange, but that's what this year was, man."
