Meshuggah have announced that their much-anticipated ninth studio album, Immutable, will be released on April 1, via Atomic Fire.
Offering a tease of a new track as part of the announcement, the band’s ‘people’ promise that the follow-up to 2016’s The Violent Sleep Of Reason, recorded at Sweetspot Studios in Halmstad, is ”simply their wildest and most esoteric sonic adventure yet.”
Drummer Tomas Haake recently told Metal Hammer “Sound-wise we were going for a warmer sound this time around, less harsh mids and highs in the guitars and less abrasive cymbals etc. Getting older, you feel like ‘I wanna be able to enjoy this’ and not just be mauled and run over.”
“The title fits perfectly for where we are as a band,” says guitarist Mårten Hagström. “We’re older now. Most of us are in our fifties now, and we’ve settled into who we are. Even though we’ve been experimenting all along, I also think we’ve been the same since day one. The way we approach things and why we still make new albums, and why we still sound the way we do, it’s immutable. Humanity is immutable, too. We commit the same mistakes over and over. And we are immutable. We do what we do, and we don’t change.”
“When you work on an album for three years, it becomes hard to think of something that doesn’t really fit into our realm,” the guitarist tells Hammer. “Definitely there’s spots on the album where we’re further away from the core of our past output, but saying there are least-Meshuggah sounding moments is basically admitting to failure. We want to be able to put our stamp on anything when we venture into music territories.”