Devin Townsend has revealed that he’s working on a new album called Powernerd and that it’s going to sound “exceptionally heavy”.
The Canadian progressive metal polymath, who fronted extreme metal project Strapping Young Lad from 1994 to 2006, posted updates about the upcoming record across social media over the weekend.
On Sunday (March 24), Townsend uploaded a brief video message to Youtube, where he revealed Powernerd was written in a more spontaneous way than usual and features his touring drummer, Darby Todd.
Said Townsend (per The PRP): “Powernerd was written with a very clear intent for me. I feel that I typically have been, and it’s not always been a bad thing, but I tend to overthink things a lot. And I get really complicated with things that sometimes – at least right now I felt like that wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I gave myself parameters for Powernerd.”
He added: “I gave myself 12 days to write it and one day to rehearse it. Darby Todd came in from the UK and then two and a half days to track drums, bass and guitar. And if it was to not work it would have been a colossal failure. But I’m happy to say it’s exceptionally heavy, and exceptionally cool.”
Townsend then shared further information on Instagram Monday (March 25), posting that the drums for the album have been recorded at Armoury Studios in Vancouver, Canada, with engineer Jakob Herrmann (Avatar, Amaranthe, Evergrey).
Townsend wrote: “POWERNERD @thearmourystudio finished tracking drums with the brilliant team at the armoury studios, drummer Darby Todd and engineer Jakob Herrmann. Really crushing, emotional, no bullshit music. Quite proud of it so far…”
Townsend released his last solo album, Lightwork, in 2022. As well as Powernerd, he is currently working on a multimedia project called The Moth.
Townsend famously categorised The Moth as “this symphony with all these cocks and vaginas and death” in a 2017 Vice interview, but has since been more coy about what to expect from the long-talked-about effort.
The musician told the Everblack podcast in October (via Blabbermouth): “It seems like I’m calling this period of creative output, I just refer to it as The Moth, but I don’t know exactly what it’s gonna entail. I do know it’s a lot of shit though. There’s a lot of things that are brewing concurrently. So although I may not know exactly what it is yet, I have no fear that when it all finally gets done, it's gonna be like an onslaught.”
Townsend has no live dates announced at time of publication.
