Clutch will start recording their 11th album in January – but frontman Neil Fallon says they’re not aiming to follow the format of 2013’s Earth Rocker.
The band will spend the next three months in pre-production before aiming to complete studio work by March 2015.
Fallon tells Lithium Magazine: “We’ll take October, November and December to finish up writing. We’ll do a run from Christmas to mid-January out to Texas, where we plan to record. Then we’ll record in January, February and probably the beginning of March, take a little bit of time off and go back out on the road.”
The vocalist says of their writing: “I think the best thing is just following your gut. I think if we tried to make Earth Rocker 2 it would be DOA.”
But he adds: “Then again, you don’t want to completely abandon it. We started writing pretty quickly, so it does bear a lot of similarities to Earth Rocker, just because we’re coming off the heels of that. If we waited five years it would be a different story.”
And Fallon says they’re becoming used to having a trademark sound, even though it sometimes causes issues when they’re writing. “We play a riff and say, ‘We’ve heard that before’ and discard it. It pushes you to find something new.
“But it’s important to accept one’s strengths. An example is a song on Earth Rocker, DC Sound Attack – that opening riff. We played it and said, ‘We’ve done this before. It sounds too much like Clutch.’ Our producer said, ‘Well, you are Clutch, so what’s the issue?’”
