Given that it’s been four years since Meshuggah released their last studio album, 2016’s The Violent Sleep Of Reason, we’re all getting a little antsy wondering when exactly the Swedes are going to grace our ears with new music. The good news is, they’re on it, and have the guts of a new album mapped out: the bad news is that it might be the tail end of 2021 before they’re ready to share it with the world.
As reported on the PRP site, the band’s drummer Tomas Haake spoke recently to former Metal Hammer writer Terry Bezer on his Mosh Talks With Beez channel on Knotfest.com and explained that, while the Umeå quintet have been steadily amassing a wealth of new material, Covid-19-enforced separation has meant that fine-tuning new songs is taking “days instead of maybe hours.”
“I think we have most of the material for the new album,” Haake says. “It takes a long time for us between each album, and this time, due to COVID as well, it’s gonna be longer than usual, I think. Right now, we’re aiming at a release in late ’21. Then the question mark right now is, is touring even gonna happen at that point? And if not, do you release the album or do you hold off with it and try to make money some other ways, like doing live shows on the Internet or whatever? It’s time consuming, for sure.”
“We tend to scrutinise everything we do a lot, too, so… I think, to some degree, you just turn kind of insane over time when you try to do this thing, because we always try to challenge ourselves and we always try to find something that [we] haven’t done before. But we’ve done this for 30 years now, so it’s harder and harder to find what’s special. Sometimes you just kind of paint yourself into a corner with that kind of thinking.”
Asked about how the new Meshuggah material is sounding, the drummer stated that the group want to stay true to their signature sound, but also push the envelope: “Kind of the opposite of what AC/DC has been doing for 40 years!”
“Of course, we have a certain framework that we still wanna sound like Meshuggah, we wanna have that signature sound,” Haake says. “But with that said, as far as the music goes, we try to [do] kind of the opposite of what AC/DC has been doing for 40 years. So we’re not trying to write the same album over and over. And whether we succeed with that or not, that’s more up to our fans and other people, but that’s definitely the aim. We try our best to kind of find new grips within the framework of what we’re supposed to be, I guess.
‘Cause we don’t wanna really step out of that either. We’re not looking to be another band all of a sudden or something that we haven’t been or that is not true to kind of what we’re doing.”
We‘re ready when you are gents.
