Mastodon have a few irons in the fire. ThePRP reports that guitarist Bill Kelliher was the featured guest on the latest episode of the RocknRoll Beer Guy podcast, where he called Trump an “orange shitstain,” talked about Mastodon’s cameos on Game Of Thrones, and revealed that the Atlanta metal veterans were in the process of writing and recording a new album when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“We were kind of right in the middle of it and we had about, I don’t know, 20 rough songs recorded right before this hit. And it just totally put the brakes on it,” Kelliher said. “I’m actually leaving tomorrow for Atlanta, we’re gonna get back together and have our first kinda… try to get back into finishing a few things that we started and seeing where we get.” This is what he had to say about the LP:

The new record, the stuff I’ve written is not quite as notey as that [Emperor Of Sand]. It’s definitely got a more like Neurosis heaviness. Like simplified guitar parts and Brann [Dailor] has been doing a lot of…He also demos most of the vocal ideas because he always has melodies and stuff like that and he’s been singing on a lot of it — at least for the demo purposes.

The vocals are kind of like an “Asleep In The Deep” style, kind of Radiohead-ish almost, real melodic. Just a lot of vocal harmonies. When I think back about it, even though we’ve got like 20-25 songs, we still don’t have all of Brent [Hinds]’s songs in there yet. And there’s still a lot of time for that stuff to change and to morph into other stuff.

There’s a couple of old riffs — cause I’m constantly writing…I may write a hundred riffs a week but only one of them is any good…I wrote some stuff years ago that I sent to Troy [Sanders] and he took it upon himself to throw down some vocals on it and spun it back to me the other day and I was very surprised. It was a pleasant surprise. I was like wow man, this sounds really eerie. Like really dark and eerie and cool. Like I never expected [him] to do anything with it…

So Troy’s trying to be more involved. Everybody has their place, their part in the band. I don’t know, every record is just a little bit different on how it gets written or who writes the majority or whose songs make it on the record or what not.

And that’s not the only new music that Mastodon are working on: Kelliher also said that they wrote a song for the long-awaited third installment in the Bill & Ted film franchise, Bill & Ted Face The Music. “We got asked, like a couple months ago, to be a part of the new Bill & Ted movie, to put a song in there,” he said. “So we wrote a song to be in that movie which we’re kinda of wrapping up now. It’s pretty fun.”

Listen to the full episode of the podcast below.