During a recent interview with Knotfest.com‘s “Mosh Talks With Beez,” Tomas Haake offered an update on the new Meshuggah album. The drummer said that he believes the band already have “most of the material” for the effort.

Haake said the following:

“I think we have most of the material for the new album. It takes a long time for us between each album, and this time, due to COVID as well, it’s gonna be longer than usual, I think. Right now, we’re aiming at a release in late ’21. Then the question mark right now is, is touring even gonna happen at that point? And if not, do you release the album or do you hold off with it and try to make money some other ways, like doing live shows on the Internet or whatever?

So, yeah, it’s time consuming, for sure. We tend to scrutinize everything we do a lot, too, so… I think, to some degree, you just turn kind of insane over time when you try to do this thing, because we always try to challenge ourselves and we always try to find something that [we] haven’t done before. But we’ve done this for 30 years now, so it’s harder and harder to find what’s special with this — like, ‘This riff, is it cool enough? Or what’s going on?’ So you tend to kind of overly scrutinize things.

And sometimes you just kind of paint yourself into a corner with that kind of thinking. And sometimes you even realize, ‘I can’t even listen to this. Why would we release anything like this? It doesn’t even make sense.’ So you have to find kind of a balance. What’s a good balance of a song or an album as far as technical aspects? And what do people wanna hear? What do we wanna hear?

And hopefully we can get to some kind of good level of mix in that. But that’s always an aspect too. And definitely with the years that we’ve put into it, we definitely feel like we’re more and more locked. It just gets more and more narrow. With each album, you’re just kind of in a tighter and tighter space.”

He also added the following about the musical direction:

“Of course, we have a certain framework that we still wanna sound like Meshuggah, we wanna have that signature sound, we want people to be able to — even if they haven’t heard the song [before] — in the best-case scenario, it’s, like, ‘Oh, that’s gotta be Meshuggah,’ even if it’s a brand new thing. So hopefully that’s something we’re aiming at.

But with that said, as far as the music goes, we try to [do] kind of the opposite of what AC/DC has been doing for 40 years. So we’re not trying to write the same album over and over. And whether we succeed with that or not, that’s more up to our fans and other people, but that’s definitely the aim. We try our best to kind of find new grips within the framework of what we’re supposed to be, I guess.

‘Cause we don’t wanna really step out of that either. We’re not looking to be another band all of a sudden or something that we haven’t been or that is not true to kind of what we’re doing.”

[via Blabbermouth]