Mastodon going for 'darker pop' edge on new album

A picture of Mastodon's Bill Kellinher
Bill Kelliher (Image credit: Getty)

Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher says there won’t be any tracks as “poppy” as The Motherload on their upcoming 7th album.

Describing The Motherload – from last album Once More ‘Round the Sun – as the “poppiest” song Mastodon have ever written, Kelliher says he is going for a darker pop sound on the follow-up.

Kelliher tells Morgan Richards Interviews: “What I can tell you is it definitely sounds like Mastodon and there are peaks and valleys of one extreme to the other.

“A lot of the things that I wrote sound like Once More ‘Round The Sun, but even delving deeper into all those nooks and crannies or progression and a lot of catchy choruses and melodic verses, but not so much like The Motherload – that’s pretty poppy for us, probably as poppy as we’d ever be sounding.

“It’s not quite in that direction. It’s hard to say ‘dark’ and ‘pop’ at the same time, but, when something pops and it really speaks to you and it’s catchy, like something you wanna hear again.

“A lot of the songs that I’ve written for this record are like that. They need to come back to the chorus to bring back that same good feeling you got in the beginning. That’s just me. I like to tie everything up nice and neatly most of the time.”

Mastodon hope to release the album in early 2017 and drummer Brann Dailor previously said they were chasing a “more proggy” sound.

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Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.