Mastodon have 20 demo tracks recorded for new album

"Mastodon hasn't worked since last summer. We've been taking this time off to relax and to write a new record, and we were kind of right in the middle of it... we had about, I don't know, 20 rough songs recorded right before this [pandemic] hit and it just totally put the brakes on it. I'm actually leaving tomorrow for Atlanta. We're gonna get back together and try to get back into finishing a few things that we started and see where we get."

"It's all relative to who's writing. With [2017 album] 'Emperor of Sand', my mom was really sick with brain cancer and tragically passed away from that right when I was in the heart of writing that and I was getting a lot of my demons and my riffs out for that record in particular. I really helped write that a lot. With this new record it's kind of the same. I've definitely been writing like a madman, like crazy. It's different than 'Emperor of Sand'. There's definitely a vibe going on. I don't know how to describe it. I've been doing this 'riff of the day' things live on Facebook and Instagram, videos of me playing riffs and playing old songs, and I have to relearn them and everything and most of them are off 'Emperor of Sand', stuff that I wrote I'm showing. I'm like, 'wow, these are some sick riffs' and the new record, the stuff I've written, it's not quite as notey as that, but it's definitely got a more like Neurosis heaviness, [with] simplified guitar parts. And Brann has been doing a lot of... he always demos most of the vocal ideas cause he always has melodies and stuff like that... and he's been singing on a lot of it, at least for demo purposes. The vocals are kind of like a [2014 Mastodon song] 'Asleep in the Deep' style, kind of Radiohead-ish almost, like real melodic, a lot of vocal harmonies. When I think back about it, even though we've got like 20-25 songs, we still don't have all of Brent's songs in there yet and there's still a lot of time for that stuff to change and to morph into other stuff."

"We got asked a couple months ago to be a part of the new Bill and Ted movie, to put a song in there. So we wrote a song to be in that movie which we're kind of wrapping now."