CLUTCH’s JEAN-PAUL GASTER Gives A Timeframe For The Band’s Next Album

New Clutch is in the works and drummer Jean-Paul Gaster has a pretty solid grip on how it’ll all play out. According to Gaster in an interview with El Expreso Del Rock, Clutch has about nine songs in the works that they’ll start to hash out with producer Tom Dalgety. Once those are wrapped up, they’ll get filed away and it’ll be on to the next batch of songs.

“At the moment, we have about eight or nine new song ideas, and our friend Tom Dalgety, the same producer from before, he’s gonna come and hang out with us next week,” said Gaster. “And we’re gonna start working through those ideas. And we will not record an album [next week], but we will work on these ideas and sort of refine them, perfect them, and then at that point, we’re gonna set those songs aside and then we’ll write another batch. And then from there, we will make the record.”

Clutch bassist Dan Maines had roughly the same comments in a recent interview with iRock, 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. 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 vocalist] 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.”

In the meantime, definitely check out the 2023 “complete” edition of Sunrise On Slaughter Beach with three extra bonus tracks. It’s excellent!

As for the new material, Fallon said in a recent chat with TotalRock’s Hobo On The Radio the album is still slated for a late 2025 release – third or fourth quarter to be precise.

“We probably — we won’t be recording until next year. And I’m gonna say hopefully the album will come out in the third quarter or fourth quarter of 2025. Which sounds like it’s far away, and I guess it is, to a degree, but that’s gonna come around pretty quickly for us. We’re gonna do it with Grammy-nominated producer Tom Dalgety again. He was awesome. But that never stops us from playing these new songs live, which they’ll inevitably be everyone’s favorite version and they’ll hate the record’s version, but that’s just the way it goes.”