Meshuggah have released The Abysmal Eye as the first single from their forthcoming Immutable album.
Set for release on April 1 via Atomic Fire, the follow-up to 2016’s The Violent Sleep Of Reason, is being touted as Meshuggah’s ”wildest and most esoteric sonic adventure yet.”
Hear the single below:
“For us, it wasn’t all that clear that we were making a new album,” admits guitarist Mårten Hagström. “We knew we could do it, but did we want to do it?. We had to decide, are we doing this or what else are we doing? After a long, long discussion, we agreed on certain things. We would make an album with as few restraints as possible. We would go in and try to make as cool an album as possible, have no anxiety about it and see it as an opportunity. How do we make this a challenge that we feel like accepting and rising up to? Pretty quickly we had a starting point. Everybody started to write, the ball started rolling and suddenly we were sitting there, discussing how many songs we were going to have to cut!”
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 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,” he 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.”
