DEVIN TOWNSEND Is In The Studio With His “Exceptionally Heavy” New Band POWERNERD

Devin Townsend‘s projects are usually massive undertakings that require tons of writing, updates to fans, and ultimately provide a deep listening experience for everyone involved. Powernerd doesn’t seem to be that.

According to Townsend in a new video update, he’s written and tracked a brand new project called Powernerd in roughly two weeks. Townsend said he gave himself 12 days to write the songs, one day to rehearse, and two-and-a-half days to record. All we know is that Powernerd is “exceptionally heavy,” which is always good news when it comes to Townsend.

“Powernerd was written with a very clear intent for me,” said Townsend. “I feel that I typically have been — and it’s not always been a bad thing — but I tend to overthink things a lot. And I get really complicated with things that sometimes… at least right now I felt like that wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I gave myself parameters for Powernerd.

“I gave myself twelve days to write it, and 1 day to rehearse it. Darby Todd came in from the UK and then two and a half days to track drums, bass and guitar. And if it was to not work it would have been a colossal failure. But I’m happy to say it’s exceptionally heavy, and exceptionally cool.”

A super heavy project from Townsend isn’t shocking at this point either, considering his recent remarks in a Music Radar interview regarding genre hopping. It’s also exciting considering Townsend does super heavy extremely well.

“It’s not like if you are in a certain genre you should limit yourself to that, otherwise you’re stepping outside,” said Townsend at the time. “It’s like there’s no nuance between opinions lately, is what it seems. It’s not like you can say, ‘I do believe that but I also believe that. I agree with you. I also agree with them, and somewhere between that, it’s a grey area. It’s not so black and white.’ Listening habits for me were never black and white. I loved everything – except for the stuff that I didn’t love and I absolutely hated!”

“I think when I first came out people were like, ‘I don’t understand.’ It seems indicative of some kind of schizophrenic personality disorder that you would release something like ‘Oh My Fucking God’ and then also do things like ‘Thing Beyond Things’, or do ‘Death Of Music’, or ‘Punky Brewster’, and I was always confused by that because I thought, ‘No. I like all of those different things.”