Mastodon Talks About New Album

Billboard.com reports: Mastodon is five songs into its next Warner Bros. studio album, which the group is recording in its Atlanta hometown with producer Brendan O'Brien.

Drummer Brann Dailor tells Billboard.com that so far, "everything sounds real creepy and spaced out and different." He's particularly enthused about a 15-minute jam dubbed "The Last Baron," which happily, O'Brien had no interest in making shorter or changing.

"There's so many toys to play with over at his studio, like pipe organs and all this crazy sh*t," says Dailor, who was introduced to O'Brien through Bruce Springsteen drummer Max Weinberg (his son is a big Mastodon fan). "There are little cool things we're going to do to the record that we've been wanting to do for a long time."

Dailor promises the as-yet-untitled album, which should be out before the end of the year, will have the conceptual feel of prior releases "Leviathan" (based around "water") and "Blood Mountain" ("earth"), but he's not ready to get specific just yet.

"I think a lot of people didn't realize 'Blood Mountain' was a concept record," he says. "We made up our own story again this time, but we may try to make it a little more evident that that's what's going on. I like to keep them speculating on our message board. There's no possible way they could guess this."

As previously reported, Mastodon will be touring Europe on the Unholy Alliance tour late this year with Slayer and Trivium. Initial tour dates were just revelaed here.

Read the full article at Billboard.com.