The new Mastodon album (or potential double album) simply can’t come soon enough, but guitarist Bill Kelliher has an idea of when it may be released. In a new interview, Kelliher reveals Mastodon hope to unleash their seventh LP in early 2017.

How’s that for a start to the year? Back in June, guitarist / vocalist Brent Hinds shared he had written an entire Mastodon album himself during the Once More ‘Round the Sun sessions. The other 3/4 of Mastodon have written a full-length as well, so we may get both at once come 2017.

During the 2016 Reading Festival, Bill Kelliher offered some new info on Mastodon’s next piece during an interview with Morgan Richards. "In the past six months, I've built a studio in my basement, where I can sit down there and really write and concentrate, so I feel like out of the eleven or twelve songs that we've got demoed with vocals and a lot of lyrics, but not… The lyrics are always the last thing to shape up together,” says Kelliher. “I think we're pretty close. I think it's not gonna take very long to get in the studio and knock it out. Hopefully [it will be] an early 2017 release."

As for what the record may sound like, the guitarist describes, "What I can tell you is it definitely sounds like Mastodon, and there are peaks and valleys of one extreme to the other. But, you know, to me, 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 just melodic verses and stuff like that, but not so much like 'The Motherload'; that's pretty poppy for us, probably as poppy as we'd ever be sounding. 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.” [via Metal Injection]

We’re ready for it! Stay tuned as news on Mastodon’s seventh studio album continues to break.

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