With news and speculation surrounding Opeth's forthcoming album, Christmas struck again this week with news of sludge/prog-metal behemoths Mastodon's new album, also due sometime this Autumn. The album has been christened The Hunter and in an interview with the Terrorizer website, the band hinted that this was a reference to the death of bandmember Brent Hinds' brother, himself a hunter, last year.
Additionally, the band has stated that 'The Hunter' will feature no high concept of any kind, nor any epic tracks that have occasionally featured on previous releases such as Leviathan and Crack the Skye (Here's looking at you, 'Hearts Alive' and 'The Czar'). This strikes me as a bit of a shame - I've always been a fan of their more ambitious works, and Mastodon had been following a trend of crafting each album on a different element - Remission, Leviathan, Blood Mountain and Crack the Skye represented fire, water, earth and air respectively, and the style and songwriting of each release symbolising a different facet of Mastodon's talents as a unit. They never shied away from pushing the accepted boundaries of heavy metal music in each album, and they have a big hand in the way that the genre has evolved as a whole over the past decade. So it would be a shame if they decided to stick to just doing some fun tracks with neat little riffs in, without any real progression to their sound - it could even represent a regression of sorts. Maybe.
However, Mastodon are more than capable of creating high quality material under any circumstance, even if The Hunter is touted to be a very straight-laced affair. As with Opeth's Heritage, the weight of expectation will be weighing heavily upon them, but as I heaven't heard anything yet, my judgement will be reserved until I finally get my grubby mitts on the new album.
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