Clutch Has ‘A Solid 10 Ideas’ For A New Studio Album
Clutch bassist Dan Maines recently spoke to Chile’s IRock about the writing a new album to follow up 2022’s “Sunrise On Slaughter Beach” LP, saying, “We’re kind of in the middle of some deep writing sessions. We’ve been getting together quite a bit, but it’s all focusing on new material, trying to write songs for a new album. It’s going really well.”
Maines added, “We get together in a studio and we are just recording every single idea that we have. If it gets to the point where we’ve got two parts together that kind of resemble a verse and a chorus, and everyone’s happy with it just music-wise, we’ll record those ideas. And then we put that aside and move on to something else. And we upload those files so that all four of us can listen to them at home. And Neil (Fallon, Clutch singer) will take a good hard listen to them and think about vocal ideas for those parts. And we start piecing together things. Sometimes he’ll listen to something from one day that he thinks might work really well with something from the previous week. And if it requires tempo changes or key changes to kind of blend those two parts together, we’ll work on that. But, yeah, it’s kind of a very organic process. Right now I would say we have probably about a solid 10 ideas that you could call songs, but they definitely need a little more fleshing out. But, yeah, it’s exciting.”
As for when you can expect a new Clutch album, Maines said, “We’ll go down to South America for the week’s worth of shows (in late July 2024) and then come back and try to do some more writing before we get into full kind of tour mode, which is summertime. We’re heading over to Europe for European festivals, and then we have a lot of touring that picks back up in the fall here in the U.S. So we’re trying to get all of our writing done now as much as possible. And it’s going pretty good.”
“Sunrise On Slaughter Beach” was recorded at the The Magpie Cage Recording Studio in Baltimore, Maryland and produced and mixed by Grammy-nominated producer Tom Dalgety (Ghost, Royal Blood, Pixies), with additional engineering by J Robbins (The Sword, Jawbreaker, Against Me!).
Clutch has GOT TO BE one of the most underrated rock bands ever. Name a more underrated rock band. I’ll wait.