Mastodon has been good for a new record every three years in recent years. Considering Emperor Of Sand came out in 2017, it follows that drummer Brann Dailor says the band should begin working on a new one early 2019 after they're done touring.
Dailor tells Consequence Of Sound that the band works on riffs while they're on the road, but doesn't give too much thought on actual songwriting and figuring out what they'll use until after they're home.
“We’re always a work in progress, trying to figure out what we’re going to do next. We’re letting the ideas just come and setting them to the side for future work, and once in a while just sort of saying out loud what those ideas might be — whether they’re collected onstage when we’re doing soundcheck or if they are something that gets worked on backstage.
You hear somebody noodling, and you’re like, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ Whenever the ears perk up to either [guitarists] Brent [Hinds] or Bill [Kelliher] doing something backstage, that’s always a nice little surprise.
Once we get home, and we decompress from the Emperor Of Sand tour cycle, sometime early next year, we’ll start dumping out the riffs and seeing what’s new and seeing what’s fresh and what we’re digging on, and then we’ll just start working — do what we normally do.”
It'll be interesting to see where they go after Emperor Of Sand, considering that was basically Mastodon circling around back to their progressive metal days of 2008.
