Mudvayne’s Chad Gray Says Band’s Next LP Already In the Bag

On Sept. 9, Mudvayne's inaugural Pedal to the Metal Tour concludes in Oklahoma City, Okla. after a successful summer spent on the road rocking amphitheaters with the likes of Black Label Society, Bury Your Dead, Static-X and Suicide Silence.

This is one of Mudvayne's last big promotional pushes for 'The New Game,' the album they released last winter. So hardcore fans hoping the band will add some of the new material they've come up with to their last remaining sets should abandon that hope right quick.

"[The next Mudvayne record] is completely done," Gray tells Noisecreep. "There's still no title for it yet, and we have no idea when we are putting it out ... no idea what's going on with it. This will come out whenever it comes out. We just recorded it to do it. We had time, and there wasn't anything going on last summer, so we went in, and recorded it."

Gray didn't want to talk about the new record in any detail. He wouldn't discuss lyrical themes, song titles ... nothing. "We're still in the headspace of 'The New Game' and supporting that record," he says. But, we wouldn't let him get off the phone without giving us something ... just a tiny morsel of what's to come.

"I'm not that guy to be like, 'Oh, it's like the old stuff,' because it's not. But I think that there's a retrofitting to it, where it's got kind of that older vibe, but there's like big interludes -- but they're, like, more band interludes ... they'll lead into songs," he explains. "Kind of brooding, kind of prodding musical parts that end up going into the song ... it's a strange record, man. It took me a while to wrap my head around it."

Gray says the album, which was produced by Dave Fortmann's right-hand man, Jeremy Parker, was a fun one to make. And he hopes "it succeeds, because personally, from a songwriting point of view, it's a little more retro for Mudvayne. We've been kind of making this natural progression, and I think for this one, we just sort of naturally regressed. We took the smarter songwriting guys that we've become and mixed it with the not-smart songwriting guys that we were ... I mean, we used to just take 20 parts, cram it together, and call it a song. Over time, playing in a band, you kind of know what to expect. It doesn't really make it easier, but you kind of have this thing in your head that you kind of know where you're going. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel before entering the tunnel. It's faint, and dim, but it' s there."