Mastodon will release their anxiously awaited ninth full-length album, HUSHED AND GRIM, on October 29, 2021 via Reprise Records. Closing a four-year gap, this notably marks the heavy rock quartet’s first double album and first new record since 2017’s Emperor of Sand, which netted the Atlanta band a GRAMMY® Award in the category of “Best Metal Performance” — their first win for the five-time nominees. Over the past year, the group recorded HUSHED AND GRIM in their hometown, collaborating with producer David Bottrill [Tool, Rush, Muse, Peter Gabriel] behind the board. As their most ambitious body of work to date, it consists of 15 tracks, surveying sonic landscapes of rock, psychedelia, punk, metal, alternative, and prog threaded together by the innately expressive musical interplay of these four virtuosic musicians. At the same time, an atmosphere of very real loss, loneliness, and longing permeates through the trio of cathartic vocals as they musically say goodbye to old friend, confidant, and longtime manager the late Nick John by architecting a magnum opus that bears the influence of his eternal memory.
We had a chat to drummer Brann Dailor about the new record and how it came together during the covid pandemic plus we find out more on the song they contributed to the Bill & Ted movie soundtrack, sharing hilarious videos on social media and much more.
Andrew: So the new album “Hushed & Grim” out October 29th, how are you guys feeling about it? Sounds fantastic from what I’ve heard so far.
Brann: It feels good but I just wanted it to be out, you know? We’ve been sitting on it for a while so I can’t wait for everybody to hear it, hopefully they’ll dig it because it’s a lot of music [laughs].
Andrew: Yeah it’s definitely a lot of music. It’s been a little, about 4 years since the last record but obviously during the pandemic you guys were working on it so what difference did the pandemic make as far as the recording process and all that kind of stuff? Was it difficult to get through?
Brann: No luckily our bass player found a place actually a few years ago we opened up a recording studio here in Atlanta that is inside a building that we bought that we turned into a practice space and we practice there as well but then we put a recording studio in the basement. It’s pretty much the reason why we were able to record this album otherwise we wouldn’t of been able to go to the regular places that we go to record it, it wouldn’t of been a possibility. That fact that we got our own place, we can work a couple guys at a time, go in there and demo everything over and over again and then when it was time to do it for real, David Bottrill [Producer] flew in from Canada and he just doubled up with us. It took a few months to record the whole thing but it wasn’t really a challenge luckily to do aspects of it.
Andrew: At what point did you start coming up with ideas and writing the songs, was that before the covid stuff or was it during that time?
Brann: No it was before. We got off a tour with Coheed and Cambria, we did a 10 year anniversary of “Crack The Skye” tour. We got off later than we would have because we did that whole summer tour, I think it was mid-July we got off the tour and we started to get together to start sifting through riffs and things somewhere around October/November just lightly dipping our toes in the water of Mastodon again and seeing what we got. I think we had 4 or 5 songs by January or so, February happened and then March happened and well, March happened and we went into lockdown and then we didn’t see each other for about 4 months so it wasn’t until about July that we started getting back together but we had all sort of waited around before we started getting back together and going over the demos that we had already recorded and then adding things and little by little we took about 20 song ideas and so we needed to whittle it down and have a conversation about having a bigger batch or not. So we recorded these 15 and we decided from some of that what we’ll stick with and that’s what we did, everybody went and recorded those and when everybody listened to it and one of us went, ‘How about we do a double album, what would be wrong with that? I said, ‘I’d imagine after the pandemic there would be more than 1 double album?’ There wasn’t a tour booked for this album but there was nothing to do but work on this record.
Andrew: As the record was shaping up and coming together and you had a bit of an idea as to the direction you wanted to go, was there anything in particular that all you guys collectively wanted to go as far as the direction of the music and what you wanted to set out to achieve at all?
Brann: Not really. We never talk about what the music is going to sound like, I guess maybe some of the parts that we don’t like, ‘Oh not let’s not put that there’ so that’s about it. But aside from that it’s some melody where it’s like that sounds good so it’s pretty simple really. There’s not a lot of room for over analyzing when your writing and putting things together, we just play something that does something to you, you want to be a part of it. If there’s a guitar riff that I like, I get in there and start playing along with it. It’s just like evolution, the songs become what they’re going to become over time and you just gotta trust your own place.
Andrew: Mastodon has been around for a couple of decades now so has that process become easier or more difficult as time goes on? Because it seems like it’s become easier in the fact that you have so many songs on this album.
Brann: Yeah I guess we’ve never experienced a situation where ideas aren’t flowing, all 4 of us contribute something so you put us in a room together and we’ll have something in 10 minutes and it might not be a great bit but we’ll have something that we like that you could call Mastodon and the beginning of something.
Andrew: Well it sounds fantastic from what I’ve heard and it has that signature Mastodon sound as it always does. I did want to ask you about something which is slightly off topic, last year you contributed a track to the Bill & Ted original movie soundtrack which was interesting as it’s a very iconic movie. How did you guys get roped into putting a song for that movie?
Brann: We just got asked. We kind of jump at any of those opportunities, especially an iconic movie like Bill & Ted. We’re at the right age where that movie came out when we were teenagers, the original. So super fun and just saw an opportunity to be involved. With “Rufus” it was one of those songs we were working on at the time and we got it together for Bill & Ted.
Andrew: Yeah that must have been fun because like you said, it’s an iconic movie but it was a bit of a surprise to see Mastodon on that soundtrack but very cool to see.
Brann: Yeah it was cool and like I said, any opportunity to do stuff like that, go ahead, go for it.
Andrew: The other thing I wanted to ask you is I follow you on social media and you put out these really hilarious clips, there was one I saw recently where you were dressed as a clown driving around town and I was wondering as it’s obviously entertaining for the fans but where does some of these ideas come from?
Brann: Oh those are our “personality features”, as serious and sombre as some of our music is, we like to laugh and have fun. So I dressed up as a clown and drove around in my Cadillac so we grabbed some people, we filmed it and had some fun. It’s just something stupid to put out, it’s fun though.
Andrew: [laughs] It’s fun to watch and keeps everyone entertained while we wait for this new album to come out. It’s been a pleasure chatting to you today and congratulations on the new album. We’d also love to see you back in Australia at some point as well as it’s been maybe 3 or 4 years since we last saw you?
Brann: Yeah probably that much, can’t wait to get back over there.
Pre-order Hushed & Grim here
