New Mastodon Album Cover Revealed

Heavy metal band Mastodon have revealed the artwork for their new album, The Hunter. According to DailyBlam.com the band, who usually use artist Paul Romano for their album covers, changed things for this record by commissioning their set designer, A.J. Fosik.

As for the music, drummer Brann Dailor says: “It’s sort all over the place – a lot of different sounds. Some straight-up classic-rock-sounding songs, straight-up death metal-sounding songs and some completely bizarre, weirdo rock songs that we're not really sure what they are, but we love them.”

Mastodon, The Hunter tracklist:

“Blasteroids”
“The Octopus Has No Friends”
“Stargasm”
“Curl of the Burl”
“All the Heavy Lifting”
“The Sparrow”
“The Ruiner”

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Mastodon Singer Does Surf-Rock?

Mastodon are one of the heaviest bands on the planet, but singer-guitarist Brent Hinds is going in a different direction on his upcoming solo double-disc release. Brent Hinds Presents Fiend Without a Face/West End Motel is due out on June 7.

Hinds told Rolling Stone that the first disc takes his music in a surf-rock direction, while the second deals in “boozy poetry.” The albums aren’t out yet, but the musician is already talking about doing more.

“We’re just finishing up anotherWest End Motel album, and then when [Mastodon] get back from Europe,” Hinds said, “we’re going back into the studio with Fiend Without a Face, and I’m going to have Brann [Dailor, Mastodon’s drummer] and Jay Weinberg, Max Weinberg's kid, play on the record – have a rotating door of drummer guests. It’ll be a proggy sort of album.”

Of course, Hinds also talked about Mastodon’s upcoming fifth album, which the band have been working on with producer Mike Elizondo. Confirmed song titles for the disc, due later this year, include “Blasteroids” and “All the Heavy Lifting.”

“It sounds pretty different than anything we've ever done,” Hinds said. “It’s un-comparable!”

Next up for Mastodon: a summer European tour and a one-off show with Soundgarden, Queens of the Stone Age and the Meat Puppets in Washington on July 30.

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New Mastodon Album ‘Like a Really Super-Heavy Led Zeppelin’

The 2009 album, Crack the Skye, set the bar pretty high for Atlanta-based metal outfit Mastodon, but the group seem up to the task of repeating the feat. Currently, the members of Mastodon are hard at work writing a follow-up to their modern metal classic.

Drummer Brann Dailor told Noisecreep.com, “We've got a ProTools rig set up and [guitarist] Bill [Kelliher's] been learning how to use that. We're recording bits and pieces and stringing up three or four riffs together and testing them out. It's super-heavy and it sounds killer, so it’s doing what it's supposed to do. It's doing what every other Mastodon song has done for us. We really just try to play music that we dig and that's bad-ass. Our approach has always been exactly the same, and we've learned that we need to do it that way. Otherwise, it's just not right."

Dailor added, “We've got tons of stuff… too much stuff. We go in there every day and just work on it. It's coming out great. Bill's got a lot of cool riffs, too. There are so many, it's hard to know which ones we're gonna use. But we go in and jam all the time and record stuff. Then we sort it out later.”

Mastodon have earned a rep for being at the “prog” end of metal, but it sounds like their new material is more straight-ahead.

“It seems more riff-oriented. It seems a little more stripped-down,” said the drummer. “[2004 album] Leviathan was a little more stripped down, and it feels like that to me… At the moment it seems like a really super-heavy Led Zeppelin or something. It has a lot of that Bonham-esque groove to it, but really heavy and dark.”

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