Mastodon Demoed 30 New Songs For Next Album: "It's Very Difficult For Us To Narrow It Down"

Mastodon have alluded to a return to the studio for quite some time in 2020, and with sessions now due to start this month, drummer Brann Dailor has revealed that their biggest job will actually be whittling down the demos they've already made.

Speaking to 100.3 The X Rocks (via Blabbermouth), Brann says that the Atlanta titans have "way too much material" at this point in the process, having used coronavirus downtime to put together around 30 demos.

"We have way too much material, which I guess is a good thing, but also it's very difficult for us to narrow it down at this point," he says. "We've had so much time – as everyone has [during the coronavirus pandemic] – to be creative and be in the studio and write new stuff that now we have, like, 30 songs demoed, and we need to pare it down to about 12."

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Detailing the process of actually working out what should make it on to the band's new record – the follow-up to 2017's Emperor Of Sand – Brann explains, "We need an outside entity to come in that we trust to say, 'These are the songs,' but that's probably not gonna happen, so it's gonna be up to us to put our big-boy pants on and make a decision.

"But there's a few different ways that we could do things, so we are just sort of debating those things. Okay, all these songs kind of sound like they're all friends, they all are similar-ish – they sort of have the same vibe, like a more doomy vibe, a more doom side of Mastodon. So we kind of like that idea – it's kind of cool; we like that – but also there's some rippers that we don't wanna leave out. And so we're kind of discussing whether or not, do we wanna do a full kind of doom-leaning album and then, a few months down the road, record the rippers and put a ripper album out? I don't know. So we're still sort of deciding how we wanna approach it."

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